A couple of, well, curious articles appeared online Sunday regarding space policy. One, in a publication called Dollars & Sense (“The Magazine of Economic Justice”), features an interview with anti-nuclear activist Bruce Gagnon. Gagnon, one of the most visible opponents of space nuclear power, says a number of things that are at least a little strange, such as:
- “Helium-3 is one of the reasons the United States never signed the 1979 U.N. moon treaty, which says no one can claim ownership of the moon or have bases there.” (The Moon Treaty does not forbid bases in general, and claiming ownership of the Moon was actually addressed in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, of which the US is a signatory.)
- The Mars Exploration Rovers are part of an effort to exploit Mars for its mineral resources, notably magnesium, cobalt, and uranium; “NASA has said it hopes to have mining colonies established on Mars by 2025.” (I doubt NASA has ever said such a thing since the von Braun days, if ever.)
- “The rovers already on Mars are themselves also powered in part by plutonium.” (The rovers do have radioisotope heating units that contain a tiny amount—a couple of grams each—of plutonium, but are used to heat, not power, the rovers.)
Meanwhile, Brainbox Magazine, which calls itself “an outlet for radical political thought”, has published an un-bylined commentary on space exploration. While it starts off rationally enough, but starts going astray right around this statement: “It has been well-established, most effectively by Noam Chomsky, that the primary role of military expenditures, of which space travel is a integral part, is to channel massive subsidies into high-tech industry.” After some diversions on topics from helium-3 to Halliburton, the article notes “In the long term, the massive defense budget, of which NASA is a part, will be a bill passed on from the current generation to the future.” This repeated incorporation of NASA within the DoD suggests that the writers and editors of Brainbox had their brains in a box (and not in use in their heads) when working on this article.
I read both of those articles this morning and had the same response. A couple of space militarization pieces with a few wacked-out “facts” thrown in here and there. However, as in all science fiction, there is likely some truth here.
These guys know, of course, that NASA and DoD are two separate agencies, they just think it’s all part of the usual Evil Government Scam. Their conclusions are unreal because their premises are unreal.
One, also, wants to ask opponents of nuclear power in space if they know what makes the Sun work.