AUT: NoFlyby Newsletter No. 7 ./...

[NoFlyby Action Site <noflyby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

NoFlyby Newsletter No. 7
(posted at http://www.nonviolence.org/noflyby/alerts/7.htm)


Hi folks, we have too much good material and ideas to delay in sending this
newsletter alert.

1) Daniel Goldin, who is the director of NASA, will be on C-Span on Friday,
October 2 in the morning as a live guest. Please call in if you can and pose
the question, "Why risk the Earth at all with the scheduled August 1999
Cassini Earth flyby, when an independent Government Interagency group
revealed that the plutonium containers couldn't withstand the force of an
accidental Earth reentry and the 72.3 pounds of plutonium 238 could impact a
significant proportion of Earth's population with a breatheable form of
plutonium radiation pollution?"

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2) Earl Budin called and left the following transcribed voice message. We
will be following up on his idea in the form of a letter to Daniel Goldin,
and will post it at "actions to stop the flyby."

	"Jonathan, this is Earl Budin, I am at the airport on the way out of the
country for a few weeks. I just wanted to tell you about an idea that I had
that I gave to Karl Grossman on his message recorder, and hopefully between
the two of you somebody will get it. Our idea in getting a Congressional
investigation is a good one, but it occurred to me that an even more direct
way of stopping the flyby is by prevailing on Daniel Goldin, the head of
NASA. If he can be made aware of the fact that the people working under him
at NASA distorted the truth and withheld the truth and lied, in their
Environmental Impact Statement, as indicated by the independent safety panel
analysis, I think he would be constrained to hold off on the flyby, if not
cancel it completely. The idea being, of course, is that NASA kept
proclaiming that the plutonium containers would not release a significant
amount of plutonium and this was a complete falsehood as revealed by the
independent safety analysis. It's hard to understand how they can do such a
thing, but they did, and John Liver, the NASA representative in Washington,
[D.C.], will probably be able to give us an explanation when we reach him. I
gave his telephone number to Karl Grossman. He's a pretty good investigator
and hopefully something can come of this and make it a lot easier for us to
stop the flyby, rather than having to go through Congress with no certainty
that something positive will happen. As you may recall, on multitude
occasions in the Environmental Impact Statement, NASA made the statement
that the plutonium containers.. [sentence interrupted by answering machine]"


3) The following letter, written by Selma Brackman of the War & Peace
Foundation, was delivered to the Secretary General of the United Nations
and Ambassadors of all nations in the UN Security Council
	(posted at http://www.nonviolence.org/noflyby/ref/war-un.htm)


Dear Ambassador.

We call upon you as a matter of the gravest urgency to take action to
demand that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
redirect the United States Cassini space mission away from its impending
"flyby"of Earth.

Last year, despite international protests  -  including warnings from
leading scientists around the world - the United States launched into
space the Cassini mission to Saturn, carrying 72.3 pounds of Plutonium
238, one of the most lethal substances known. One pound dispersed
equally in each person's lungs could cause cancer in everyone on earth.

In August 1999, Cassini is scheduled to come hurtling back at 46,000
miles-an-hour for a planned "flyby" of our planet. This maneuver will
bring Cassini within 500 miles of the Earth's surface where a
navigational error or accident could cause re-entry into the atmosphere
where the plutonium could burn up or crash.

According to NASA's own Environmental Impact Statement a Cassini flyby
re-entry accident could expose up to five-billion people to radiation.*1

Concerns have been further heightened by the recent explosion of two
NASA rockets, including the Titan, the same rocket on which Cassini was
launched. The Titan was made by Cassini contractors, Lockheed-Martin.
Both accidents were the result of electrical failures. An electrical
failure during Cassini's flyby of Earth could cause a catastrophic
reentry.  In 1995 NASA administrator, Daniel Goldin said the Cassini
mission was so dangerous he would have cancelled it if he had the
choice.

We are further alarmed at a recent report from NASA revealing for the
first time that, since the Cassini aero shell casings around the
plutonium cells have not been designed to withstand a high speed
re-entry characteristic of the flyby maneuver, the number of estimated
cancer fatalities in such an accident could be as high as "several tens
of thousands."*2

Even worse, the calculation does not take into account the conclusions
in the April 1997 National Academy of Sciences paper on health effects
of even the most minute plutonium particles.*3 The conclusions of the
report, cosponsored by NASA, but ignored in NASA's  Environmental Impact
Statement, mean that the health dangers of the dispersal of plutonium
during an accidental re-entry are much greater than had originally been
calculated.

Dr. John Gofman, one of the world's leading authorities of the health
effects of radiation, warns that such an accident could cause almost a
million deaths from cancers worldwide over the coming decades.

Not only does a Cassini flyby accident represent a threat to life and
health, but by NASA's own figures, if Cassini strikes an inhabited area,
the cost of  property damage and radioactive cleanup could be as high
as  ten-trillion dollars.*4 However, under the little-known
Price-Anderson Act, the US government would pay a total of no more than
$100-million damages to all and any affected countries, no matter how
serious the devastation and loss of life.

The War & Peace Foundation supports initiatives by scientists, religious
leaders and citizens around the world, calling on NASA to find
alternative missions for Cassini not involving an Earth flyby. For
example, Dr. Michio Kaku has proposed that Cassini be moved off course
and redirected into the Sun. The proposed redirection could be
undertaken simply by re-programming the on-board computers. This could
be done by NASA at any time. However, as Cassini moves closer to Earth
the need to take action becomes ever more imperative.

In view of the consequences of a Cassini accident to many nations, if
not all humanity, we beg you dear Mr. Ambassador, to inform of the
contents of this letter to the President and Prime Minister of your
country, and ask for authorization to request the inscription of the
item "International dangers of an accident of the US Cassini spacecraft
upon reentry into the Earth's atmosphere, and remedy to avoid the deaths
of up to a million humans of different nations, and possible planetary
contamination."

The signatories of this letter thank you in advance for you kind
consideration of this request.


Your sincerely,



Selma Brackman
Executive Director

and:
Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Epidemiologist and ordained nun, Institute of
Concern for Public Health
Dr. Earl Budin, Radiology Dept. UCLA Medical Center
Dr, Helen Caldicott, President Emeritus Physician for Social
Responsibility
Marilyn Clemment, Women's Int. League for Peace and Freedom
The Reverend William Sloan Coffin, N.Y. Riverside Church
Daniel Ellsberg, Director of Manhattan Project II
Dr. Sam Epstein, Oncologist on environmental cancer,
Benjamin Ferencz, Former US prosecutor, Nuremberg Trials
Dr, Jay Gould, Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project
Jonathan Granoff, Vice President U.N. NGO Committee on Disarmament
Karl Grossman, author The Wrong Stuff
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit
Father Ted Hesburgh, President, Notre Dame University
Dr. Jean Houston, Director, Human Potential Institute
Hamilton Fish III, The Nation magazine
Professor Michio Kaku, Professor Theoretical Physics, CUNY
Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, Distinguished Professor of Psychoanalysis
Dr. David Krieger, President Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
Dr. Rashmi Mayur, Director, International Institute for Sustainable
Future, India
David McRenolds, War Resistors League
Father Richard McSorley , Professor of Comparative Religion, Georgetown
Univ.
Patricia Miche, President, Global Education Associates
Dr. Robert Muller, Chancellor, former U.N.Assistant Secretary General
Dr. Harold Robles, President, Schweitzer Institute
Ambassador Douglas Roche, Former Canadian Disarmament Ambassador
Alice Slater, President Global Resource Action for the Environment
Dr. Janette Sherman, Toxicologist
Dr. Alice Stewart, U.K. epidemiologist and expert on nuclear health
effects
Dr. Robert Thurman, Professor, Indo-Tibetan studies, Columbia University

Documents cited:
* 1 Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission. June,
1995, pp. 4/76
* 2 Safety Evaluation Report of the Interagency Nuclear Safety Review
Panel, July, 1997 ES-4
* 3 Mutagenic effects of a single and an exact number of alpha particles
in mammalian cells.
      Tom K. Hei, et al. Proceedings National Academy of Sciences, USA.
Vol. 94, April 1997. pp 3765-3770.
* 4 The Wrong Stuff Karl Grossman. Common Courage Press. 1998 p 49.
(calculated from figures in the  Final Environmental Impact Statement
for the Cassini Mission. June, 1995, pp. 4/70)


4) Japanese TV interview on Cassini with written answers by Russell Hoffman
	(posted at http://www.nonviolence.org/noflyby/ref/japint.htm)

Russell Hoffman is the editor of the STOP CASSINI newsletter, and webmaster
of the STOP CASSINI web site:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/index.htm
These opinions, while his own, are the result of dozens of interviews with
top radiation and space scientists who opposed Cassini, and also the result
of research efforts which included thousands of pages of NASA  documents and
numerous other sources.

**********************

Cassini questions posed to the editor of this newsletter by a Japanese news
service, which visited the editor at his office in September, 1998:

Question #1: When does Saturn explorer Cassini approach closest to Earth?
How close will it come?

NASA expects the probe to do the flyby of Earth in August, 1999.  The
closest moment is scheduled to occur August 18th, 1999.  It will come less
than 800 kilometers from Earth at that time, flying at nearly 70,000
kilometers per hour.  NASA raised the altitude of the flyby from 500
kilometers to 800 kilometers a few months prior to launch in 1997, hopefully
due to the many protests they received.  They gave a reason, but it was
unspecific.  In other words, they said they raised it to keep the overall
risk of reentry less than one in one million, but they didn't say what
caused them to think they might have exceeded that magic number they claim
to have achieved.  It's voodoo science and should be debunked.  Even if it
isn't voodoo science it's something worse: it's hidden science, since the
full details of the various weights they assign to everything is unknown,
and getting any information from them at all is nearly impossible.  For
example, how have they calculated the effect years later of some
miscellaneous bolt that was not tightened properly in the first stages of
construction?  What sort of software bugs might affect the command sequence?
What chance of failure did they assign to space debris hitting the antenna
base or coupling?  Space debris is something NASA has miscalculated by
several orders of magnitude in the past.

NASA assigned specific numbers for all this stuff, added it all together and
that's how they came up with the risk factor of one in one million, but most
of what they came up with were just wild guesses and the grand total is
nothing more than a big guess made of thousands of smaller guesses.

Question #2: Why does Cassini come near Earth?

Cassini will be doing what is known as a "gravity assist".  The move changes
the direction of the probe somewhat and adds tremendous relative speed to
enable Cassini to make it all the way to Saturn.  However, there were other
possibilities and the move was actually  unnecessary.  Not only did NASA not
need to carry the deadly plutonium in the first place because the Europeans
have developed solar deep-space solutions, but they didn't really need to
use Earth for the flyby maneuver at all either!  NASA could have arranged to
do the flyby using only other planets -- not Earth!  (Cassini has already
done a flyby of Venus).

This is one of the aspects of the mission which makes NASA's decision to use
this dangerous option so peculiar.  The Radioisotope Thermoelectric
Generators simply provide a modest amount of electricity for the mission.
They are not "mission critical" as NASA would claim.  In short, NASA didn't
need to use them, so why did they do it?  It is because the United Stated
Government wants the public to accept nuclear launches for other purposes,
such as military, and as a way to remove unwanted radioactive materials from
Earth -- by blasting them out into space, a truly mad-scientist idea.

But in fact these launches should be stopped now and forever.

Question #3: What is the probability that Cassini would fall to Earth?

NASA claims that there is less than a "one in one million" chance of the
probe slamming into Earth during the flyby maneuver. But this is the same
NASA that estimated in 1963 that the SNAP 9A probe with a kilogram of
plutonium had a one in ten million (1 in 10,000,000) chance of reentry into
Earth's atmosphere, but it did.  NASA was wrong.  This is the same NASA that
estimated that Challenger had a one in one hundred thousand (1 in 100,000)
chance of catastrophic accident, but it blew up with a loss of all seven
astronauts on board.  And this is the same NASA which touted the Titan
launch vehicle as one of the safest ever, which was used for Cassini, and
which lost their second Titan in August, 1999 and then two weeks later, they
lost the greatest new rocket, or what was supposed to be the greatest new
rocket, called the Delta III.  The only thing worse, really, than NASA's
failure rate, is their consistent inability to accurately  estimate that
same awful failure rate.  So in answer to what is the probability, only a
fool would trust NASA's meaningless numbers!  It's up there, it's coming
back mighty, mighty close to us on purpose and if anything goes wrong, it's
packing one heck of a punch.

Question #4: How could Cassini fall to Earth?

Between now and the flyby, if Cassini is lost for any reason, that is, if it
stops sending signals back so that we can track it, or if its reception
antennas fail for any reason and we cannot communicate with it, it becomes a
deadly poisoned pill in an orbit around the Sun which will be roughly the
same as our own Earth's orbit.  This would be very, very bad.  It could lead
to a collision with Earth decades or even centuries later, by which time
NASA's fancy containment system for the plutonium payload may have become
brittle and cracked, and no longer work.  Most people who oppose Cassini
today worry about the upcoming flyby, but I worry most about the time
between now and then.  If the probe is lost at any time in its flight, it is
too small to be found and will pose an incredible danger to Earthlings for
centuries.  And we won't see it coming.  We might not even see it hit us!  A
few wacky dosimeter readings, and perhaps decades later, an almost
imperceptible increase in Cancer rates.  Those might be the only clues.
Japan has a holiday in honor of statistics, do they not?  I hope they will
look at the statistics of what Cassini can do.

NASA claims to be "biasing" the Cassini space probe away from Earth as it
approaches us for the flyby, so that if anything goes wrong, it will miss
Earth.  But this so-called "bias" is a trivial amount, first of all -- only
a fraction of a percent of 1 degree of arc, probably.  For most of the trip,
it's barely even a correctable amount of difference!  Second of all, it
would still leave the probe capable of coming back at a later date.  If it
is lost for any reason, its trajectory around the solar system will be
unknown and unpredictable.  Third, this so-called "bias" actually means that
during the last few days before the flyby of Earth, NASA must actually fire
the rockets on board Cassini in order to bias the probe back again, closer
and closer towards Earth.  They actually will fire the rockets to aim the
probe towards Earth, and if any of these staged maneuvers results in an
extended burn of the firing mechanism (as has happened with past NASA
probes, which were thus lost in space (for example, Clementine)) that could
be the ultimate cause of the disaster.  I will continue hoping even up to
the last few days before the flyby, that the world will suddenly become
sane, at least temporarily, and forbid NASA from executing the unbiasing
maneuver.

Question #5: In the case of Cassini crashing into Earth, what disaster would
be caused?

It depends on many factors.  First of all, what attitude is the probe in
when it comes crashing into Earth's atmosphere and heats up in a few seconds
to 10's of thousands of degrees Celsius?  Will it be stable, or spinning, or
tumbling, or "side-on-stable" as NASA refers to one orientation, or what?
It matters a great deal, because NASA's published release rates for these
various configurations vary from 3% of the plutonium being released as
respirable particles, to 33%, to 66%, to even 97% or more.  NASA seems sure
that if by chance the probe crashes to Earth, luck will have it that it will
be in what NASA considers the safest of these many configurations, but they
don't really know.  They are guessing -- voodoo science again.

In reality, anywhere from a kilogram, to up to the full load of nearly 30
kilograms of plutonium 238 (mostly) and plutonium 239, and a few other
isotopes, could be released.  But even a fraction of a kilogram of plutonium
238 is enough to kill -- by cancer, leukemia, or other health effect --
every man, woman, and child on the planet -- if you simply give everyone an
equal portion of the whole.  So even 3% could be an enormous and unnecessary
tragedy.  There are 270 billion (270,000,000,000) potentially lethal doses
on board Cassini, and they may not spread out so nicely as NASA hopes.  They
may cluster.

The risk should have been avoided in the first place by replacing the
nuclear fuel with solar panels.  NASA could have done it, and should have
done it.

A Cassini flyby accident could release literally millions of millions
(10^12) of respirable particles of plutonium.  A "guaranteed" lethal dose of
plutonium is an invisibly-small particle -- you cannot even see it.  A
Cassini flyby accident or other reentry accident would not incinerate the
plutonium. Although plutonium dioxide is very hot and can ignite fires when
it is in chunks, plutonium does not in fact burn in a reentry accident, it
vaporizes -- turns to very fine powder.

Vaporized plutonium can take weeks, months, or even years to fall to Earth,
but most assuredly, it does fall eventually, then it might even be
resuspended again.  It is generally from 1 to 10 microns in size; which is
even smaller than a "guaranteed" lethal dose, -- thousands of times smaller.
But it is not a harmless dose, and it will be given to virtually everyone.
With plutonium, even a single solitary atom of it can cause cancer or
leukemia or genetic defects or other health effects if it is inhaled or
ingested, as vaporized plutonium will be.  It does its damage at the
molecular level -- the product of its decay (an alpha particle) can damage
the fragile DNA which most of our trillions and trillions of cells have.
Roughly 50% of all plutonium-induced cancers are fatal even in developed
countries; a far greater percentage are fatal in third-world countries.
For NASA to risk spreading this amount of such a deadly poison throughout
our ecosystem with nearly six billion souls on board is distressing, to say
the least!  Vaporized plutonium is the most dangerous form of it, because it
can be inhaled.  Even once it has settled to Earth it can still be ingested
(consumed) by mammals and other life forms.  Ingestion is perhaps several
orders of magnitude less dangerous than inhalation (perhaps less) but it is
not guaranteed safe, either.  It is all a crap-shoot.

Question #6: Do you think NASA considers the possibility of Cassini crashing
into Earth?  If you think so, how much damage does NASA predict?

NASA has very few concerns.  If you push them really hard on the idea that
the amount of plutonium 238 they are using is dangerous, they will assure
you that it cannot possibly be released.  If you convince them that even
their own documentation indicates it can, possibly, be released, they will
tell you that anything that might be released will be spread so thin into
the upper atmosphere that it will cause only an unnoticeable number of
deaths, which they consider statistically insignificant.  They claim, for
example, that although as many as five billion of the Earth's population
might absorb a dose, only about 130, or one in four million, would be likely
to develop a "health effect" (1997 SEIS).  But it really depends on many
things.  This is an average they have made up from thousands of separate and
different disaster scenarios.  It is NOT a true "worst case" scenario,
although NASA presents their averaged accident as such.  (That's the "Monte
Carlo" simulation they do).

It's as if they referred to the worst possible car accident as one in which
your car sustains minimal damage, because that is what most car accidents
are.  It ignores even a broken leg, it ignores deaths (except 130), it
ignores more than five billion people absorbing a dose.  It ignores reality.

Bonus Question #7: What is a true Worst Case Scenario?

Dr. Ernest Sternglass, professor emeritus of radiological physics at the
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine said that the folks at NASA
"underestimate the cancer alone by 2,000 to 4,000 times" but even there, Dr.
Sternglass is assuming the more likely scenario of a fairly even dispersal
throughout the atmosphere.  It is possible that Cassini will come down
directly on a major metropolis, like Tokyo, Mexico City, New York, or
anywhere else there are teaming masses.  Winds may not favor a widespread
dispersal by any means -- it might tend to stay clustered in a small area,
and if that is a place where lots of people are -- that is the TRUE "worst
case" scenario.  The death, the pain and suffering, the loss of face and the
financial losses that would occur -- these things are so terrible as to be
beyond the ability to comprehend them.  Cassini carries over 400,000 Curies
of highly radioactive plutonium -- that is as many Curies of plutonium as
the amount released from all the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons,
which now nearly everyone agrees was a health disaster for the world.
Cassini in one shot can equal that total, and more, since all of those tests
(except the second and third) were purposely done away from populated areas.
Cassini could come down anywhere and touch all of us.


5) Thanks for reading this important information and especially for any of
your actions to unite in our effort to stop endangering life with
profit-motivated projects that distort the true goodness of science and
knowledge.

Jonathan M. Haber
Joe McIntire
NoFlyby Coordinators
Action Site to Stop Cassini Earth Flyby
P.O. Box 1999
Wendell Depot, MA 01380 USA

http://www.nonviolence.org/noflyby

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