(“We claim this duck for all mankind.”)

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NASA has done it again. For the first time in the history of history, mankind has landed on a comet.

Actually, it wasn’t NASA. It was the European Space Agency that pulled it off. But with all the lying coming out of the media these days, I refuse to be the only journalist in America who’s telling the truth.

Technically, mankind didn’t land on a comet, either. True, oil rig jockeys played by Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck landed on a comet once, in the totally believable movie Die Hard XXVIII: The Wrath of Armand Geddon, but sadly only one of them died. Besides, Ben Affleck doesn’t really count — we’re talking about mankind here.

What actually did happen this past week was this: scientists in Europe managed to land a drone on a comet, and no, Gerard Depardieu was not the drone. Or the planet. The eventually extra-terrestrial European object was similar to NASA’s Mars rover, and was about the size of a washing machine, according to European news reports, which I first had to have translated since I don’t speak European very much good.

It was a or an historic moment. The European team was able to launch an unmanned laundry appliance, keep it on course for four billion miles, and then successfully plunk it on a moving comet that was some 300 million miles from Paris and demon-screaming through space at 85,000 miles per hour, or about the same speed as drivers in South Florida.

Imagine. 300 million miles away. This comet is so remote that it has only six Starbucks and a single McDonald’s.

The comet-conquering project was dubbed the “Rosetta” mission, named after an insanely expensive software program that employs “revolutionary techniques” (pictures) to teach you how to say horse in French without insulting the horse, or the French, not to mention Gerard Depardieu. The comet lander itself is named Philae, which used to be the name of an island in the Nile River, until somebody built the Aswan Dam and drowned it.

The poor, innocent, minding-its-own-business comet somehow got itself named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a cruel joke to be sure, but about what you’d expect from a continent that gave us the Marquis de Sade, Dracula, and Gerard Depardieu. (According to those Rosetta software people, Churyumov-Gerasimenko is a Siberian term meaning “French horse.”) Naming a defenseless comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko also helps make the case that, wherever it is that they name comets, much drinking is involved.

But I can’t expect you people reading this to put up with having to process an unholy mouthful like 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko every ten seconds. So let’s just call him P.

P is a craggy chunk of ice and space rock that — so say scientists — contains stuff from when our solar system was formed 4.6 billion years ago, the day after Al Gore’s first global warming scare. The comet is irregularly shaped; in fact, one online article described it as “shaped like a Play-Doh duck formed by a toddler” or a member of Congress. P was discovered in 1969 (and got named late the same night, at Hooters). It’s so far away from Earth that it takes the scientists 28 minutes to communicate with the lander, but of course communication’s faster in the other direction, since it’s downhill. With a diameter of less than three miles, P is smaller than most D.C. suburbs, and way safer.

And this last week, after a couple of half-mile bounces, we landed on it.

To hear the Europeans tell it, the comet landing was pretty tense. But then, they launched the thing a decade ago, so there’s been a bit of a lull. After ten years tailing a rock, even a Hugh Grant movie might stimulate. In fact, the whole Euro-comet story was a lot like the aforementioned movie Armageddon, but with better acting.

But now there’s some bad news being transmitted from comet P. Philae’s batteries aren’t recharging, as if Europe’s spaceship was a Microsoft laptop. Apparently the lander landed in shadow, which is a dumb, career-limiting thing to do when you’re powered by sunlight. Also, if Philae’s harpoon-like stabilizers did not get the lander anchored tightly, it could roll onto its back and never get back up.

So now it’s a washing machine and a turtle. That landed on a duck named after a horse.

It makes you wonder how Europe ever evolved past horned helmets.

Meanwhile, back here in The Land of the Free Healthcare & The Chinese-Debt-Soaked Under-Water-Over-Mortgaged Home of the Brave, don’t you think for a minute that the severely defunded scientists at NASA have been idle. Armed with their “right-sized” budget from President Obama ($15 and a Panera Bread coupon), the thinkers at Cape Canaveral have just announced their latest invention: a biodegradable drone, for use when spying on bad guys, that self-destructs when it crashes, like a Chevy Volt, or Miley Cyrus.

Of course, thanks to the budget cuts, we need not be surprised to discover that NASA had to fabricate the thing from materials that were, well, creative. As in cheap.

And that’s why NASA’s new spy plane is made out of fungus, bacteria, and wasp spit.

Ha! Take that, Europe!