Few impediments could have been more serious. For a spacecraft to reach the Jovian system fast enough to end its orbit around Europe, it had to launch from a powerful rocket (which was missing at NASA, limiting the spacecraft to a deployment of the space shuttle) or be absurdly light (which was the necessary radiation armor) imposed). JPL engineers tossed equations hastily written in chalk before throwing their fists against the blackboards in case of despair.
Nothing for NASA was always free … except gravity assistance. Typically, the agency could compensate for the low speeds of heavy spacecraft by taking indirect flight paths and using planets found along the way to pull and push the robotic pilgrim out, inward, or forward. The immutable laws of physics, and known prominent numbers, NASA’s orbital dynamists could do so throughout the day, executing the numbers on the spaceship with sling, from one planet to another: the propulsion free from Isaac Newton. It was incomparably the best offer in space exploration.
But then television press journalism got involved and everything got complicated.
In 1997, while waiting for takeoff at Cape Canaveral, the Cassini mission was suddenly besieged by political protest. Cassini carried three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, powered by the decay of plutonium 238. Plutonium was not from the Return to the future the variety, a haunting drop of frightening substance, in fact, in a homemade flow condenser, but was stored in ceramic form, wrapped in iridium and wrapped in graphite. It could not corrode, be destroyed by heat, vaporize, disintegrate as an aerosol, or dissolve in water. It was made to withstand not only the explosion of the rocket carrying it, but even a catastrophic re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Because it could not be vaporized, in a disaster situation, no one would inadvertently breathe it and develop additional superpowers or appendages. In fact, it was designed so you could even eat things. The human body could not absorb it.
But ten days before three and a half million pounds of rocket, they were placed inches between Cassini and Earth, a much smaller number: 60, as 60 minutes—Cloated almost at NASA. CBS TV news magazine aired a feature on the soon-to-be-prepared spacecraft for Saturn, Steve Kroft starring in the segment. The correspondent’s opening line: “On October 13, a Titan IV rocket is scheduled to leave Cape Canaveral carrying seventy-two pounds of deadly plutonium; enough plutonium, in theory anyway, to deliver a lethal dose to all the men, women, and children of the Earth’s surface several times. “
And it got worse from there. Cassini was a later reflection on the story, and the expert interviews were interspersed with comments from … non-experts, for being kind, but not very well-spoken experts, whose contributions are generous. —Lines included such as: “What gives anyone, including the federal government, the right to risk the death or injury of the population or just for space exploration?”
The segment featured a Department of Energy plutonium expert who categorically stated that even if the rocket, spacecraft, and graphite-sealed ceramic plutonium, wrapped in iridium, and exploded on the launch pad, was literally impossible. for the garbage do what the protesters said he would do. But to balance it out, Kroft’s trial menagerie described in scrupulous detail what plutonium is, not in the way NASA uses it, which you could safely scatter on your breakfast cereal, because, of we, you could eat it“I could do it with the human body.” Highlights include “it can cause lung cancer” and “you could have numbers like 100,000 or more people developing lung cancer” and “if there’s a blast like that, you can kiss goodbye in Florida.”
Kroft even found a former NASA employee (“He’s neither a scientist nor an engineer,” Kroft admitted, “but …”) to publicly lament his role in endangering life for frivolities like space exploration. “I feel guilty, frankly,” lamented the penitent.
To seal the deal, Kroft interspersed the story with excerpts from an interview with Wes Huntress, head of NASA’s planetary program, who had presided over the success of the Mars Pathfinder landing just a few months earlier.
“This comes from your own environmental impact statement,” Kroft told Huntress: the host’s tone was solid but affable, his appearance hard but his eyes somehow benevolent. “I want to read a couple of things about it.”
Huntress was a pioneer in the study of interstellar clouds and one of the world’s leading experts in planetary exploration, but it was not exactly tabloid television material and, after the cavalcade of activists arguing convincingly and without interruptions, he seemed less confident in his answers.
Kroft quoted: “If there is an accident, it is spoken, quoted,” removing and removing all vegetation from contaminated areas, demolishing some or all of the structures and permanently relocating the affected population. “
“If there’s an accident like that,” Cazadora said, accurately but unassisted.
Kroft replied, “I mean, that sounds pretty drastic …” and Kroft waited patiently for Huntress, with the rope needed to hang, to fill the silence, which 60 minutes the subjects of the interview always did, and he did, and he did.
“This boy didn’t even know what his own official Armageddon report was saying.”
Well, what they’re mostly talking about is the damage that happens on the site, near the ‘near’, near the launch pad, because it’s obvious that when there’s one of these things there’s a lot of damage near the launch pad. ”
And after the huntress, dance and step upthis boy did not even know what his own official Armageddon report said.—And, finally, he came out of the gallows with grace, they made a well-perfected entourage of convictions, explaining exactly how life ended as we know it, and kissing your babies tonight for our foolish quest to conquer the cosmos – Saturn! This futile mission to a gas giant, whatever it is, will leave mutated survivors fighting for the latest canned goods on store shelves.
Worse, Cassini would make a second turn with the peaceful people of planet Earth. If it didn’t explode at launch, it was set up to follow a VVEJGA trajectory to increase its path to Saturn: that is, two turns of Venus (V, V), and then it would play chicken with Earth, and if something went wrong … (but if all goes well, from Earth [E] to Jupiter [J] by gravity assistance [GA]).
The Clinton administration did not really have time for this, but it duly absorbed the letters and panic optics of the protesters holding the concertina-covered chain-link fences on the perimeter of Cape Canaveral, while inside, police he lined himself with armor and wore riot shields looking silently. , just waiting … what? Open fire? Branded clubs?
Still, NASA advanced with its reckless rocket launch that would probably leave only cockroaches tracking the Earth (or what some future species would call this planet), and things were fine, as they had been in previous launches dozens of times. . But the headquarters message to those presenting future space missions: if you have to launch radioactive material, no plans trajectories that take the spacecraft to Earth to help it by gravity. No one needs a headache.
Which meant, for Karla and company, discussions for years about possible commitments for the Europa Orbiter mission, as it was called. They analyzed other trajectories, other launch vehicles – anything to get more mass to get proper scientific feedback. What hardware do you make that is “radiation resistant” (radiation impermeable (but expensive))? What was the smallest possible scientific payload? Ultimately, they found a relatively happy medium: a spaceship that could launch directly and achieve the minimum science needed to make an expedition from Europe worthwhile, and NASA loved it, and then the cost doubled. , and in 1999 Ed Weiler shot her. Just like that.
From THE MISSION o: How an insurrection to Saturn survived a disciple of Carl Sagan, a motocross runner, a Texas Tea Party congressman, the worst typewriter seller in the world, people from the mountains of California, and an anonymous official of NASA that went to war with Mars? , Traded blows with Washington and stole a ride on an Alabama lunar rocket to send a space robot to Jupiter in search of Eden’s second garden at the bottom of an alien ocean within an ice world called Europe (A true story) by David W. Brown. Copyright © 2021 by David W. Brown. From Custom House, a line of books by William Morrow / HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted with permission.