Trump's NASA Plans Are a Nuclear Disaster Waiting to Happen | Turthout | Nukes in Space

by Linda Pentz Gunter

Photo: Mat Hampson

Earlier this month, President Trump announced that he wants the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to "lead an innovative space exploration program to send American astronauts back to the moon, and eventually Mars." But while couched in patriotic sound bites and pioneering rhetoric that "Florida and America will lead the way into the stars," the risks such ventures would entail -- and the hidden agenda they conceal -- have scarcely been touched upon.

For those of us who watched Ron Howard's nail-biter of a motion picture, Apollo 13,and for others who remember the real-life drama as it unfolded in April 1970, collective breaths were held that the three-man crew would return safely to Earth. They did.

What hardly anyone remembers now -- and certainly few knew at the time -- was that the greater catastrophe averted was not just the potential loss of three lives, tragic though that would have been. There was a lethal cargo on board that, if the craft had crashed or broken up, might have cost the lives of thousands and affected generations to come.

It is a piece of history so rarely told that NASA has continued to take the same risk over and over again, as well as before Apollo 13. And that risk is to send rockets into space carrying the deadliest substance ever created by humans: plutonium.

Now, with the race on to send people to Mars, NASA is at it again with its Kilopower project, which would use fission power for deep space. It would be the first fission reactor launched into space since the 1960s. Fission, commonly used in commercial nuclear reactors, is the process of splitting the atom to release energy. A by-product of fission is plutonium…

Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat to Our Planet | Karl Grossman | August 1, 1997

…One (and possibly the only) journalist who has been consistently on the "nukes in space" beat for more than 30 years is Karl Grossman. When the Apollo 13 movie came out, he picked up the phone and called the film's production company, Imagine Entertainment, to ask why they had not included the higher drama of the plutonium problem. "It was surprising to see Hollywood not utilizing an Armageddon theme," he told Truthout…

…A war in space might not involve nuclear weapons -- for now. But warring satellites could knock out nuclear weapons early warning systems and set other potential disasters in motion. These cataclysmic risks play strongly into the arguments -- enshrined in the recent UN nuclear weapons ban -- that we should be disarming on Planet Earth, not arming in space…

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