Monday, July 28, 2008

Astronaut says NASA wants to Nuke asteroids

I am starting to get a sinking feeling here. First I hear that Nasa is asking for funding to track Earth crossing asteroids. That's good.... Then NASA starts talking about reasonable ways to deal with possibly dangerous ones. Again good deal. Then we hear about Rusty Schweickart B612 Foundation, which wants to alter asteroid orbits in a controlled manner. My reaction is that this seems like duplication of efforts. Isn't that what NASA is working on? Why diminish that effort? Then what starts to sound like sour grapes Schweickart says NASA favors using nuclear bombs. But in a 2007 report, that's exactly what NASA is proposing. Now excuse me, hasn't this method proved itself to be one of the LEAST effective? Then reading in a Gizmodo article, NASA and Schweickart's motivations got a lot clearer. As Gizmodo puts it:
  • Schweickart believes its (NASA) cash-strapped later years might have led the agency—under immense pressure from Washington—to endorse a program with an ulterior motive: put nuclear weapons in space.
I don't know why I should be surprised, it's well known that several shuttle mission were thinly disguised military, many of the pre-mercury launches like the Aurora were out and out spy flights, I can totally get behind there being ulterior motivations for what at first sounds idiotic. And in the end, what makes it totally insane, is the fact that a platform like this could be taken out with a well place can of nails. But that is another story...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great! When the Cylons come back, they'll just stop, pick up the nukes and bring them to the key cities around the planet... All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again!

Beam Me Up said...

Oh I was so ready to jump on this for being like WAY late and then the last sentence! You watched the last show! EXCELLENT! We saw television science fiction history in the making with that last. Just the scenes with all guns blazing! It's saying "I'm giving ya everything I got!" All else pales. Right down to the Watch Tower close...wonderful.