Those of us who have followed NASA’s use of plutonium-238 dioxide in prior space missions are terrified of this particular launch. Why? Bad engineering!

The containers for the plutonium are NOT designed to prevent the release of their deadly contents during certain critical and unavoidable phases of the flight: Late launch, for example, or a full-stack powered impact into the earth (something they have self-destruct mechanisms to avoid, but even self-destruct mechanisms have been known to fail at critical times).

There are many pathways to failure in this mission, failures which can result in massive poisonings of Florida or nearly anywhere else on the planet — or simply the whole planet.

The alternative, after reading the description of the problem with solar power in the article, appears to be simply to put dust-wipers on the solar panels.

Instead, the additional weight of this new rover demands a new method of landing on Mars — the old one was unreliable anyway. (Bouncy Bouncy.) This one will be, too, one can be sure of that. So all that plutonium might be launched for naught — hundreds of billions of lethal doses’ worth of one of the world’s most deadly poisons. (Pu-238 is nearly 300 times more toxic than normal “weapons grade” plutonium (Pu-239). It’s half-life, about 87 years, is correspondingly shorter than Pu-239′s 24,000 year half-life.)

Thousands of people have already protested these dangerous nuclear launches. NASA’s arrogance regarding its use of plutonium-238 for “civilian” purposes appears to be directly related to the U.S. government’s stated desire to launch plutonium and uranium-powered military rocketry for “domination” of outer space near earth. So there are two very good reasons to oppose this launch, besides that it’s a waste of money.

The amount of space debris already in orbit guarantees that if nuclear payloads are launched, there will be catastrophic accidents and fall-backs to earth, possibly over highly-populated areas. This one launch could cause a major city such as Tokyo or New York to have to be abandoned! The containers are designed to release their payloads at high altitude in the event of an accident, but that doesn’t actually save a planet full of people because Pu follows a “Linear, No Threshold” health effects pattern, as far as we know (“we” being the National Academy of Sciences, for example). So no matter where or how it comes down, it’s bound to poison a lot of people before it all decays. And a significant portion of the Pu is, in fact, Pu-239 with its 24,000 year half-life.

This launch is anything but an engineering marvel and anyone truly curious about it will be aghast. It’s a potential human disaster. Thus it is already an engineering failure, and forcing this horrific risk on billions of unsuspecting humans (who are now breathing Fukushima’s effluent as well) is especially cruel. There is no reason for NASA to do this.

The author’s prior comments on Cassini were published in Space News, The Washington Post and elsewhere. He is a computer programmer and co-author of Statistics Explained, a computer program which teaches first-year statistics for scientists. He is also the author of All About Pumps and the Animated Periodic Table of the Elements, and a co-author of The Heart: The Engine of Life, all computer programs. He has also authored a book about nuclear power: The Code Killers (2008).

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“A radioisotope power source will provide heat and electric power to the rover, enabling the MSL to travel at up to 90 m/hr”

90 MPH?! I can believe perhaps 9 MPH on the Martian surface. Must be a typo…..

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Oh, Ace Hoffman, the professional scaremonger?

He must of either failed Statistics class or he’s getting paid significant money to publish such fallacies. Did you know that the chances of radioactive material contamination (and that doesn’t imply any deaths yet) were 1 in 1400 during the first few minutes and 1 in a million after that. Even before that, many probes using RTGs were successfully launched, for example the Viking rovers.

“The alternative, after reading the description of the problem with solar power in the article, appears to be simply to put dust-wipers on the solar panels.”

Oh yeah, Mr. Know-It-All, why don’t you work at NASA? They will surely thank for your help because their skilled engineers are probably too dumb to realize this!

And the argument that it’s a waste of money? So you don’t care about space exploration?

OK. Let’s look at this: NASA in 2008 received about 0.6% of the U.S. budget. And that is the whole of NASA, not just one project/mission. Now look at the military spending: the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force (and that’s still not all military spending) took 33 times more money than the whole of NASA. Would you consider this a waste? This year alone, there are about 8 DoD projects (why don’t you criticise those, huh?) taking more than the *whole* MSL mission. So why not just cut the military a bit, fund all the research including the exploratory missions and still have plenty of money left? I think that’s a good deal.

But if you insist on not funding these kind of missions because you have panic fear of everything with a bit of Plutionium in it, or somebody pays you well to pretend that, it’s OK too. Soon smarter countries like China or India will get there and lead the Solar System investigation instead of the U.S., which will be quite embarrassing to say the least.

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