Few impediments could have been more severe. For a spacecraft to reach the Jovian system with enough speed to eventually achieve orbit around Europa, it had to either launch from a powerful rocket (which NASA lacked, limiting spacecraft to a space shuttle deployment) or be absurdly light (which the required radiation armor rendered impossible). JPL engineers dashed out hastily written equations in chalk before driving fists against blackboards in fits of despair.
Nothing for NASA was ever free… except for gravity assists. Ordinarily, the agency could compensate for the meager speeds of heavy spacecraft by taking indirect flight paths and using planets encountered along the way to yank and shove the robotic pilgrim outward, inward, or onward. The laws of physics being immutable, and the salient numbers known, NASA’s orbital dynamicists could do this all day, running the numbers to sling spacecraft precisely, one planet to the next: free propulsion from Isaac Newton. It was incomparably the best bargain in space exploration.
But then television tabloid journalism got involved, and everything became complicated.
In 1997, while waiting at Cape Canaveral for liftoff, the Cassini mission was beset suddenly by political protest. Cassini carried three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which were powered by the decay of plutonium 238. The plutonium wasn’t of the Back to the Future variety—a disquieting drop of Scary Substance Indeed into a homemade flux capacitor—but rather was stored in a ceramic form, wrapped in iridium, and caked in graphite. It could not corrode, or be obliterated by heat, or vaporize, or 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 reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Because it couldn’t vaporize, in a disaster situation, no one would inadvertently breathe it in and develop superpowers or extra appendages. In fact, it was designed so that you could even eat the stuff. The human body could not absorb it.
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But 10 days before three and a half million pounds of rocket thrust put inches between Cassini and Earth, a much smaller number—60, as in 60 Minutes—nearly nailed NASA to the ground. The CBS TV newsmagazine aired a feature on the soon-set-for-Saturn spacecraft, Steve Kroft starring in the segment. The correspondent’s opening line: “On October thirteenth, a Titan IV rocket is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral carrying seventy-two pounds of deadly plutonium; enough plutonium, in theory anyway, to administer a fatal dose to every man, woman and child on the face of the Earth several times over.”
And it got only worse from there. Cassini was an afterthought in the story, and interviews from experts were interspersed with comments from… nonexperts, to be kind, but very well-spoken nonexperts, whose contributions—the generous ones! —included lines such as, “What gives anybody, including the federal government, the right to risk the population’s death or—or injury just for space exploration?”
The segment featured a plutonium expert from the Department of Energy stating flatly that even if the rocket, spacecraft, and graphite-sealed, iridium-wrapped, ceramic plutonium blew up on the launch pad, it was literally impossible for the debris to do what protesters said it would. But just to be balanced, Kroft’s menagerie of doomsayers described in lurid detail what plutonium—not in the form used by NASA, which you could safely sprinkle on your breakfast cereal, because, again, you could eat it—could do to the human body. Among the highlights: “it can produce pulmonary cancer” and “you could have numbers like 100,000 or more people who develop lung cancer” and “if there is such an explosion, you can kiss Florida good-bye.”
Kroft even found a…
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