When the 60-minute hysteria nearly brought down a NASA mission on Saturn

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute via Getty

Few impediments could be more serious. For a spacecraft to reach the Jupiterian system fast enough to eventually reach orbit around Europe, it needed to be launched from a powerful rocket (which NASA lacked, limiting the spacecraft to a space shuttle launch) or be absurdly light (which is the necessary radiation armor made impossible). JPL engineers drew up equations hastily written in chalk before hitting their fists against blackboards in fits of desperation.

Nothing for NASA was ever free … except for gravity assists. Normally, the agency could compensate for the meager speeds of heavy spacecraft by taking indirect flight paths and using planets found along the way to pull and push the robotic pilgrim out, in, or forward. Since the laws of physics were immutable and the salient numbers were known, NASA orbital dynamizers could do this all day, processing the numbers to accurately launch the spacecraft from one planet to another: Isaac Newton’s free propulsion. It was incomparably the best deal in space exploration.

But then television tabloid journalism got involved and everything got complicated.

In 1997, while waiting at Cape Canaveral for takeoff, the Cassini mission was suddenly seized by political protests. Cassini carried three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which were powered by the decomposition of plutonium 238. Plutonium was not Back to the future variety – an unsettling drop of frightening substance on a homemade flow capacitor – but, instead, it was stored in a ceramic form, wrapped in iridium and hardened in graphite. It cannot corrode or be obliterated by heat, or vaporize, or disintegrate like an aerosol, or dissolve in water. It was made to resist not only the explosion of the rocket that carried it, but also a catastrophic re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Because he cannot vaporize, in a disaster situation no one would inadvertently inspire him and develop extra superpowers or appendages. In fact, it was designed so that you could even eat things. The human body was unable to absorb it.

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But 10 days before 1.5 million pounds of rocket momentum placed centimeters between Cassini and Earth, a much smaller number – 60, as in 60 minutes– almost pinned NASA to the ground. The CBS TV news showed an article about the Saturn spacecraft, Steve Kroft, starring in the segment. The correspondent’s opening sentence: “On October 13, a Titan IV rocket is scheduled to take off from Cape Canaveral carrying twenty-two pounds of deadly plutonium; enough plutonium, at least in theory, to administer a fatal dose to every man, woman and child on Earth several times. “

And it only got worse from there. Cassini was an afterthought in the story, and expert interviews were interspersed with comments from … not experts, to be kind, but not widely talked about experts, whose contributions – the generous ones! —Included lines like: “What gives anyone, including the federal government, the right to risk the death of the population or – or injuries just for space exploration?”

The segment featured an Energy Department plutonium expert categorically stating that even if the rocket, spacecraft and iridium-sealed ceramic plutonium exploded on the launch pad, it would be literally impossible for the wreckage to do what the protesters said it would. But just to keep it even, Kroft’s collection of doom hunters described in shocking detail plutonium – not in the form used by NASA, that you could safely sprinkle on your breakfast cereal, because, again, could you eat it– could do with the human body. Among the highlights: “it can produce lung cancer” and “you can have numbers like 100,000 or more people who develop lung cancer” and “if there is such an explosion, you can kiss Florida goodbye”.

Kroft even found a former NASA employee (“He’s neither a scientist nor an engineer,” admitted Kroft, “but …”) to publicly lament his role in putting lives at risk for frivolities like space exploration. “I feel guilty, frankly,” lamented the penitent informant.

To seal the deal, Kroft interspersed the story with excerpts from an interview with Wes Huntress, head of NASA’s planetary program, who had presided over the successful landing of the Mars Pathfinder just a few months earlier.

“This is in his own environmental impact statement,” Kroft told the Huntress – the host’s tone is solid but affable, his face rigid, but his eyes somewhat benevolent. “I want to read some things from him.”

Huntress was a pioneer in the study of interstellar clouds and one of the world’s leading experts on planetary exploration, but he wasn’t exactly TV tabloid material, and after the cavalcade of activists arguing convincingly and without interruption, he seemed less than confident in your answers.

He quoted Kroft: “If there is an accident he says, quotes, ‘removal and disposal of all vegetation in contaminated areas, demolishing some or all of the structures and relocating the affected population permanently.'”

“If there is an accident like that,” said the hunter, accurately, but uselessly.

Kroft replied, “I mean, that sounds pretty drastic …” and Kroft waited patiently for the hunter, in possession of the rope needed to hang herself, to fill the silence, which 60 minutes interviewees always did, and he did, and did.

“Well, the – what they’re probably mostly talking about is – is the damage at the site, near the – near – near the launch pad because there is clearly, when one of those things goes, a lot of damage near the launch pad. “

And after the hunter tap-tapped and staggered …this guy didn’t even know what his official Armageddon report said!– and finally jumped gracefully from the gallows, well-trained prophets of doom followed, explaining precisely how Life as We Know It was coming to an end, and kiss your babies tonight because our reckless quest to conquer the cosmos – Saturn! This useless mission for a gas giant, whatever that means, will leave mutant survivors fighting over the last canned food on looted store shelves.

Worse yet, Cassini would deal a second blow to the peaceful people on planet Earth! If it didn’t explode at launch, it was set to follow a VVEJGA trajectory to propel its way towards Saturn: that is, two oscillations of Venus (V, V), and then it would go play chicken with the earth, and if something goes wrong … (but if everything goes well, from Earth [E] for Jupiter [J] for gravity assistance [GA])

The US Air Force security police form a line to stop protesters protesting the launch of the Cassini nuclear powered spacecraft in front of the security fence on October 4, 1997 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Cassini is a scientific spacecraft that will travel to Saturn on a five-year journey to orbit the planet and implant a probe to the surface.

Roberto Schmidt / AFP via Getty

The Clinton administration didn’t really have time for this, but obediently absorbed the panicked letters and optics of the protesters holding accordion-topped wire fences on the perimeter of Cape Canaveral, while inside, the police lined up with armor and riot shields looking silently, just waiting for – what? Open fire? Brandishing canes?

However, NASA has moved forward with its reckless rocket launch, probably leaving only cockroaches crawling across Earth (or whatever some future species calls this planet), and things were fine, as they have been in previous launches dozens of times. But the message from headquarters to those entering future space missions: whether you should launch radioactive material no plan trajectories taking the spacecraft back to Earth to aid gravity. No one needs the headache.

Which meant, for Karla and the company, years of discussions about possible compensations for the Europa Orbiter mission, as it came to be called. They looked at other trajectories, other launch vehicles – anything to get more mass for an adequate scientific return. What hardware do you make “rad-hard” – impervious to radiation (but expensive) – instead of simply wrapping it in “stupid mass”, that is, large blocks of cheap protective armor? What was the smallest possible science payload? In the end, they found a relatively happy medium: a spaceship that could be launched directly and achieve the minimum science necessary to make a Europe expedition worthwhile, and NASA loved it, and then the cost doubled, and in 1999 Ed Weiler shot her. Just like that.

From THE MISSION, or: As a disciple of Carl Sagan, a former motocross racer, a Texas Tea Party congressman, the world’s worst typewriter seller, California Mountain People and an anonymous NASA employee went to war with Mars, survived an insurgency on Saturn, exchanged blows with Washington and stole a ride on an Alabama lunar rocket to send a space robot to Jupiter in search of the second garden of Eden at the bottom of an alien ocean within an ice world called Europa (a real story) by David W. Brown. Copyright © 2021 by David W. Brown. From Custom House, a line of books from William Morrow / HarperCollins Publishers. Reproduced with permission.

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