UFO UpDates Mailing List
From: magnus@io.com (Bruce Lanier Wright)
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 1996 09:45:26 -0600
Fwd Date: Sat, 14 Dec 1996 23:33:54 -0500
Subject: Nuclear Debris Lands on Chile?
Media Ignores Real Fate of Failed
Russian Probe?
by Kristi Coale and James Glave
A nuclear cloud hangs over the failed Russian Mars
space probe, and most of the US media is looking the
other way. That's the assessment of nuclear activists
and watchdogs familiar with the true details of Mars 96's
fiery re-entry and breakup into Earth's atmosphere.
The craft was originally reported to have fallen
harmlessly into the South Pacific near Australia.
However, the probe, powered with a half-pound of highly
radioactive Plutonium 238 pellets, broke up in the
atmosphere over South America on 16 November and
rained down on Chile and southern Bolivia, according to
a 4 December report in the Boston Globe.
The Globe story said the US Space Command waited
until 27 November to reveal that its original predictions
of an ocean landing had been wrong and that "pieces of
it may have hit Chile or Bolvia."
Plutonium 238 has a shorter half-life and generates a
good deal more radioactivity than standard
weapons-grade Plutonium 239.
"You have this shit drop as it did, who knows where the
hell it spread," said Karl Grossman, a professor of
journalism at the State University of New York and
expert on space journalism. "It's going to be around for a
couple thousand years. That's a significant problem."
Grossman characterized the failure of The Wall Street
Journal, the Washington Post, and The New York Times
to follow up on the story and report the actual crash area
as absolutely disgraceful.
"What we have here is space boosterism," he said.
"US Space Command wanted to get this off the front
pages, so they sat on [the news of the actual crash site]
for 11 days," said Bruce Gagnon, state coordinator of
the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice, an activist
group fighting to keep plutonium out of space.
"Now, everyone's talking about the hatch that's stuck on
the space shuttle," Gagnon said.
Gagnon believes that NASA and the US Space
Command wanted to downplay the story to keep
concerns about launching plutonium into space at a
minimum. Next October, NASA will launch the Cassini
Probe to explore Saturn. That spacecraft will carry 73
pounds of Plutonium 238.
Had word of the terrestrial crash leaked out when the
Mars probe was still page one news, eyes would have
turned to Cassini and perhaps placed the project in
jeopardy, Gagnon said. By sitting on the news, the
government keeps the flow of information on plutonium
in space in small pieces that are easily digested by the
press, lulling them into a state of complicity over space
developments, he said.
"NASA feeds the information to the reporters a little at a
time, and they get used to the idea. We're now used to
the idea that we use plutonium in satellites," said
Gagnon.
Gagnon said plutonium isn't the only answer; it's what
NASA and the Department of Energy, which oversees
certain aspects of the space missions, advance while
downplaying other sources. For example, solar power is
a possible source for propellants for satellites. Although
NASA has issued reports that find solar power
inadequate for deep space satellites such as Cassini,
the press has failed to dig deeper, said Gagnon.
Copyright =A9 1993-96 Wired Ventures, Inc. and affiliated companies.
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