Yup, but to be more precise LV-223 is actually a moon. They didn't want that black good shit anywhere near their home planet. Seeing as how all hell broke loose with it (not once but now twice) it was a good choice.
'You would have to go two more films until you get to be anywhere near Alien'
-R. Scott
He also said this movie is about
questions, not
answers.
Here's a good dissection of the movie
A couple interesting tidbits from the director-
“From the very beginning, I was working from a premise that lent itself to a sequel. I really don’t want to meet God in the first one. I want to leave it open to [Noomi Rapace’s character, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw] saying, ‘I don’t want to go back to where I came from. I want to go where they came from.’“
In fact, the original script for Prometheus flat out explained why Earth was targeted for destruction, and the reasoning ties into Scott’s thoughts on religion. They ultimately felt the idea was lacking in subtlety and scrapped it, but Scott elaborated on the plot point to Movies.com and his comments may provide a hint as to where the follow-up could go:
“We definitely did [have that in the script], and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an ‘our children are misbehaving down there’ scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, ‘Lets’ send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it. Guess what? They crucified him.’”
One pointless criticism I read a lot is how they just "happened" to end up right at the exact location of the ship. Well, they've already explained that there were many of them, and it's a movie. Why waste runtime for the sake of wandering around looking, especially when you're on a hi tech spaceship that already traveled millions of miles through an abyss right to the moon itself. I'm sure most people have had a "small world" type of meeting by chance before.