Today a very symbolic milestone was passed on Amerika's decline. We can no longer launch a man into space. Now I'm not saying manned spaceflight is a good or bad thing, but it is a VERY prestigious thing for a country. It's a symbol that a country has arrived on the world stage, or in our case starting to depart it.

So now we have to hitch a ride with the Russian's if want to "slip the surly bonds of earth.. and touch the face of god" in low Earth orbit. "Hey Sergie you goin' to the Space station this month? Mind if we hitch a ride?" will now be NASAs manned space flight program.

But the money that will no longer be used to shoot people into space can now be diverted to killing them on the Earth, and put into Bankster's pockets. Empires have their priorities you know. We are done with Empirical exploration, and now spend all our resources on Empirical exploitation.

Was not Carl Sagan a big proponent of atomic power in space? Did he not die of a radiation induced leukemia?
We dream of the stars but I think they are a little too far away.

Point number 1: It would be nice if NASA would release a document explaining how the 1 in 220 figure they get for an accident occurring was obtained. After the Challenger disaster, Richard Feynman talked to NASA people about how they estimated the chances of a disaster, and said they did not know what they were doing. Has anything changed since then?

Point number 2: Does anyone on the congressional committees which oversee NASA know about this estimate? If no, why not? If they do, why hasn't it been publicized?

For the same reason that real-world capable, self-powered solar car is not practical, as Mars rovers get bigger and faster, (the existing solar-powered rovers move only a little faster than the minute-hand a clock) powering them by solar likewise will be impractical.

The RTG is in a very rugged, heat-shielded container that is very unlikely to break open or burn up in the event of a lunch accident. For example, after the Apollo 13 fuel cell explosion the astronauts had to use the lunar module life support systems to get back to earth. This necessitated that the lunar module, which was carrying an RTG for instrumentation to be left behind on the moon, be allowed to re-enter and burn up while travaling almost 25,000 miles per hour. The RTG survived intact and is now resting on the seabed in the Tonga trench, and test show that it's graphite, irridium and ceramic container will last 10 half-lives. No plutonium has ever been detected in the sea or atmosphere from this event.

The old US and Russian RTG's that did release plutonium are designs that are no longer used.

The report that NASA prepared represents an absolutly worst case - just like the maps that show the inundation of whole cities that every dam keeps on file.

The authors comparison of the odds of a plutonium release to risks that cause near-certain instant death like airliner crashes is just silly. The radon and its daughter products (including hyper-toxic Po210) in many people's basements is already presenting a far greater risk than that would occur to a random person from a plutonium release from an RTG.

People, Karl Grossman, and that other guy from Ohio are lawyers, they have no scientific or engineering/technical training of any sort. The very job of a lawyer is to obfuscate and confuse.

The report that NASA prepared represents an absolutly worst case - just like the maps that show the inundation of whole cities that every dam keeps on file.

For the same reason that real-world capable, self-powered solar car is not practical, as Mars rovers get bigger and faster, (the existing solar-powered rovers move only a little faster than the minute-hand a clock) powering them by solar likewise will be impractical.

Nuclear energy provides enormous amounts of power in incredibly compact form. For exmple, an RTG the size of a car battery and weighing a couple pounds using Polonium 210 could power an electric car continuously for a couple years. Polonium 210 is an incredibly toxic, hyper-intense alpha emitter - much worse than Plutonium, so such an application would never be considered for safety reasons, but it shows what incredible sources of carbon-free energy nuclear materials can be.

"An accident if NASA continues to insist on mixing atomic energy and space -­ a nuclear disaster above our heads -­ that, indeed, could end the space program."

FALSE! If nuclear disasters haven't stopped the nuclear industry on lthe planet's surface, there is absolutely no reason to think that inevitable nuclear disaster(s) in space "could end the space program/"

The privatized profit-driven nuclear industry, like all other toxic energy industries, basically doesn't give a damn about inevitable nuclear disasters. The only concern is to maximize their profit.

The entire toxic energy industry (oil, coal, gas, nuclear, etc.) must be permanently nationalized (socialized) to transition these industries towards using safe, renewable, NON-TOXIC TECHNOLOGIES.

Instead of allowing the rape of the natural resources of the planet for the profit of corporations and wealth accumulation of the super-rich, the natural resources must be safely used to the economic benefit of all people. The profits should be used to fund the transition to non-toxic energy technologies.

THE EFFECTS OF ENDING CAPITALIST EXPOITATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES WOULD BE IMMENSE!

* WARS in the Middle East could end as the motivation for oil profits wold end!

* GLOBAL WARMING, CLIMATE CHANGE, ECOLOGICAL DESTRUCTION, in major part caused by fossil fuel pollution could be stabilized.

* THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISES, INTRINSIC TO CAPITALISM, COULD BECOME MINIMIZED.

* The vast planet-wide destruction caused by the capitalist exploitation could begin to restore clean air, clean water, to end the destruction of land and humans.

Read: World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org

Thanks Karl for promoting the Global Network!

Not only does the Global Network organize "against weapons and nuclear power in space" as their name says, but they also do incisive analysis of US global military planning and strategy. They have several excellent videos available on these matters.

Sign up for their e-mail bulletins, www.space4peace.org.

From the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man) on the Nagasaki atomic bomb:

… The result was that in the Fat Man bomb, about 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of the 6.2 kilograms (14 lb) of plutonium in the pit (about 17%) fissioned. In this process 1 gram (0.035 oz) of matter in the bomb was converted into the active energy of heat and radiation (see mass-energy equivalence for detail), releasing the energy equivalent of 21 kilotons of TNT or 88 terajoules.

So how come vaporizing over 10 pounds of plutonium over Nagasaki didn’t give all the bomb survivors lung cancer?

call me confused...

when discussing a potential global 1lb plutonium distribution, we discuss the enormous costs of the potential cleanup, down to the square mile...

yet, when discussing an actual 2+lb event that actually occured in 64, and was actually tied to an increase in cancers, we ignore cleanup altogether?

were millions and millions spent on cleanup following that event?

if not, why pretend such things would cost even a penny in the future?

Actually, it would not end up costing the government anything because they would invariably claim it "posed no hazard" (eg: "because it all fell into the ocean" ) and they would therefore never pay a single dime for "cleanup" -- to say nothing of damages to those whose health was affected (because they would deny that anyone was affected)

If the rocket blew up on launch, how would one even begin to "clean up" gazillions of particles that are so small you would need a microscope to see them? It's absurd to suggest that it is even possible, to say nothing of put a price on it.

Incidentally, if 10 pounds of plutonium somehow ended up being "dispersed" (vaporized) over a major metropolitan area, it would almost certainly require the evacuation of the entire city and possibly make it uninhabitable for TENS of THOUSANDS of years (the half life of plutonium is 24,000 years.

It's a terrorist's wet dream (at no risk and no expense to themselves).

Sometimes when I read the truly idiotic things that we do to ourselves (just because we can -- and because some company gets paid for it), I don't know whether to laugh or cry -- or just scream at the TV.

By the way, the original "mars rovers" did quite well running on solar power (one continued to send data for over 6 years).

Given that there is a very effective benign alternative, you have to ask yourself "why would they even take the chance?" (particularly if the chance is actually 1/220, which is very high when it comes to high risk ventures)

Someone almost certainly stands to make a lot of money on this project.

And you can bet that some member (or former member) of Congress is greasing the rover wheels.

Is there a petition we can sign?

On May 11, 1969, a huge plutonium fire burned for many hours at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant located 16 miles west of Denver, thus upwind in one of the windiest locations in Colorado. It was a near miss as outside scientists later assessed the data. Or as the Pentagon's General Giller said to a congressional investigating committee a year later when asked what would have happened had the fire not been finally brought under control after burning for 18 hours, "Hundreds of square miles could be involved in radiation exposure and involve cleanup at an astronomical cost as well as creating a very intense reaction by the general public exposed to this." No BS translation: The Denver area would have to be abandoned as uninhabitable for thousands of years, essentially for the rest of human history.

This was the worst of numerous plutonium fires at Rocky Flats over the years. Lesson: never, ever trust human beings doing anything involving super deadly plutonium. Consider the thinking or lack thereof involved in even siting a plant involved in processing and milling plutonium directly upwind from a huge city. In fact the ruling elites of the old Atomic Energy Commission violated numerous of their own siting criteria in placing the plant at Rocky Flats, as they knew full well how deadly the stuff is for thousands of years. Nonetheless they went ahead and constructed and operated it there for more than 40 years. Denver should have an annual celebration on May 12 each year to mark and celebrate the fact that it escaped a history ending contamination event in 1969. So why should the glib reassurances now of the NASA people be given any more respect and credibility than those given about the Rocky Flats facility over the years. Maybe the atomic establishment still regards much of the population in the same way that it did the hapless "downwinders" who lived near the Nevada atomic bomb tests of the 1950s to 1980s as a "low use segment of the population".

As to the question of Plutonium dispersal after Nagasaki, it may well have happened. Though the nuclear scientists knew about such things, who else did? We could well have had accelerated cancers, etc., and not tied it into Nagasaki, or Hiroshima. Cause of death? When a doctor isn't even aware of the exposure?

Heart failure, old age, stomach ulcer, cirrhosis, colon cancer, prostate cancer, etc. We've had enough cancers in our history to have them accepted without bringing up the more recent horrors. It is only recently that we have become aware of and more sensitive to radiation accidents. The nuclear industry doesn't worry about health hazards because it is so difficult to prove that your terminal cancer is due to exposure ten or twenty years ago. They would probably argue that death due to exposure a few months ago is just coincidence.

The main thing to remember is that all of this stuff is basically to make billionaires richer and save some jobs at our bomb research plants. The health of the world means nothing from that perspective.

Welcome to the Corporate State!

How dare they? And the public, its potential victims, will pay for it?

This does not smell good.

See:

Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA, Enlarged and Revised Edition by Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara (Sep 1, 2009)

An educated guess would suggest that there is more going on here than meets the eye.

...Exopolitics-wise that is.

"The Truth Is Out There."

We're just too stupid and self-involved to recognize it.

Decades ago, Dr. Edward Martell, of the NOaa in Colorado (who was familiar with John Gofmann), observed that smoking tobacco did not cause cancer until the atmospheric nuclear tests left radionuclides on the sticky leaves of the plant. Alpha radiation in the lung then became the primary source of lung cancer.

For many years, when I was a kid growing up living, literally, on Main
Street, in a small midwestern college town, up the street, off a side street, was a very small uranium milling facility I did not know existed until many years later. It contracted to a massive nuclear plant NW of Cincinnati that along the highway had a huge checkerboard-square sign out front that led most local people to believe it was a Ralston-Purina pet food plant. Both the small local milling plant and the massive plant contaminated the area.

Somehow, Jack Nicholson seems relevant here. In his first major film, "Easy Rider," he is clubbed to death while in a sleeping bag (and Peter Fonda is blown away on his motorcycle by shotgun-wielding rednecks in a pickup). Later, Nicholson shows up in a high-tension military film in which he says, paraphrase, "You want the Truth? You can't take the Truth." Then there is the real classic, "Missouri Breaks," in which he says to Marlon Brando at the end of the movie, paraphrase, "The reason you just woke up is that I just slit yore throat." Brando gurgles some semi-liquid from his mouth, his eyes doing strange: he makes no attempt to utter. They do not show the throat. He had it coming. Almost a Mercy Killing. (An aside: throat slitting does not affect the spine directly. It is the trauma, not the effect, that prevents retaliation. In theory, I could be spurting blood from my neck and still have a chance to kill you...)

Over the decades, Science has learned again and again that nuclear radiation is far more dangerous than earlier scientists understood. These bastards, knowing the dangers, killed my father, nearly killed my mother, killed my younger sister, killed my grandmother and my aunt on the paternal side, and I do not know of a single family resident on Main Street who has not suffered a cancer death.

There will be no epidemiologic studies here. As another poster observed here, too many variables to DO Science! The lawyers would take over and the costs would be too great. So it goes, since at least WWII.

*****
As for the existence of ET, for humans to believe that in the vastness others are not more intelligent would be a Conceit. Frankly, we would be far better off trying to comprehend the plants and fungi around us than expending billions visiting outer space, about which we can do nothing. We don't have to seek Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. It will come to us, if we are regarded as deserving of it.

Radiation may be invisible to the human senses, and it may have taken around a century to understand it. Its use in human history is mostly Entropic: destructive of what Henry Adams, in "The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma" (circa 1910) called the "Life Force." (He was aware of Einstein's theories...)

We have had MANY nuclear disasters "overhead."

As an old doctor of mine used to recite, as a joke, "the solution to pollution is dilution." Would that this were so, but it ain't. (In pollution chemistry, perhaps at some level this makes sense, but not with radiation, the effects of which are utterly cumulative.)

We don't need a space program. Our science has garnered enough raw data to keep researchers busy for decades to come. And we still have the telescopes...

-30-

THE SKY IS FALLING!
This article is a masterful work of Chicken-Littleism, quite worthy of a journalism professor. Mr. Grossman scares his readers by subtly implying that the upper-atmosphere disintegration of a spacecraft containing 10.6 pounds of plutonium might cause widespread human fatalities. He does this by writing:

"Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, has long emphasized that a pound of plutonium if uniformly distributed could hypothetically give a fatal dose of lung cancer to every person on Earth. A pound, even 10.6 pounds, could never be that uniformly distributed, of course. But an accident in which plutonium is released by a space device as tiny particles falling to Earth maximizes its lethality. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose."

I will leave aside any analysis of the questionable veracity of Dr. Caldicott's claim, or of the well-known untrustworthiness of statements from scientists promoting their own political beliefs. I will only mention in passing that Mr. Grossman's claim that plutonium (or any other poison, for that matter) is more lethal in diluted rather than concentrated form is obviously the exact opposite of the truth. The most important thing that I wish to point out is that any alert reader of this article will notice a logical problem with Mr. Grossman's scare story nine paragraphs farther into the article. There, in case some of his readers may believe that such an accident would kill millions (or billions), but still doubt that the event is very likely to occur, Mr. Grossman reveals that a NASA report has documented that such accidents already have occurred:

"The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, [the report] notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to Earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth and Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer."

So, 2.1 pounds of plutonium already has been dispersed widely over the Earth, nearly a half century ago, and the worst that Mr. Grossman can say about the result of this is that one university professor has claimed to have linked the accident to an increase (amount unspecified) in global lung cancer. This revelation rather deflates the big scare story, but a master journalist knows that many (if not most) readers won't make that connection, especially if it appears much later in his article.

As a critic, I was amused by Mr. Grossman's choice of experts to quote on the subject of policy recommendations in the face of this great threat, especially Leah Karpen and Ace Hoffman, whose qualifications to comment on this matter appear to consist of being residents of Asheville, North Carolina and Carlsbad, California, respectively. Nice (common) touch.

To any reader who did not recognize this article as deceptive political propaganda, I recommend the following action: get a subscription to Duh! Magazine and read it regularly. That publication contains many articles (with pictures!) which are very helpful for people like you, such as the classic "Knives: Which End To Hold, And Why." If you lack the mental ability to master the process of acquiring a subscription, go to your local newsstand once a month. Just say "duh" to the man behind the counter. He will know what you need.