Having begun their nuclear assault on Saturn, NASA has announced that it intends to attempt an assault on PLUTO next.

NASA Notices 98-136 and 98-137 are about "RPS" nuclear power supplies for the Europa Orbiter mission and the Pluto-Kuiper Express mission. They are Notices of Intent to prepare Environmental Impact Statements and to conduct "scoping".

There is only until November 23rd 1998 to respond to these requests for public comment regarding the proposed EISs. The "scoping" phase has until December 18th, 1998. In both cases, notice was originally made on October 7th, 1998 but it has taken several weeks for letters to arrive from NASA, severely cutting down the time to respond.

NASA should abandon both of these nuclear-powered missions and use solar power (ESA now claims that this is possible). However, NASA makes up the "need" for deeper and deeper missions just to force the need for nuclear power! Just to have a reason to set up the system for extracting the plutonium 238 dioxide and developing the power supplies. And why do they want to have this capability? For military missions!

Instead of concentrating on what they could study safely, NASA pretends it is essential to flit from planet to planet to planet, and to hell with anyone who thinks the risks aren't worth the gains.

Pluto! And what does NASA say we'll learn? The usual: "The origin of life."

This is their excuse for virtually every single mission since Gemini. The secret of life. This they claim they will discover. How many lives will it cost to learn this secret? And how far from Earth do we need to go to discover it, when we haven't even explored the Tonga Trench in any great detail (but which, not coincidentally, NASA uses as a nuclear dumping ground)?

Pluto is over 3.5 billion miles away. There, NASA believes we will find the secret of life. At a potential cost of millions of lives.

At the time of Cassini's launch last year, NASA claimed their next generation of nuclear power source would use "only" 20% of the plutonium used by the current generation of RTG, for the same amount of electricity. But even this is too much to allow.

NASA should be stopped dead in her tracks before she stops us dead in ours.

The NASA contact person for these two comment periods is:

Mr. David Lavery
Advanced Technology and Mission Studies Division (Code SM)
Office of Space Science
NASA Headquarters
Washington DC 20546-0001

Comments must be submitted on or before November 23rd, 1998! The Notices of Intent were published in the Federal Register (Vol. 63, No 194, pp. 53938 - 53939). "Scoping comments" must be submitted by December 18th, 1998 and directed to the person named above. The notification adds that written comments must clearly identify which of the two NOI they are directed at. Email will be accepted but written comments are preferred. No phone numbers are provided.

The email address to comment on the Europa Orbiter mission is given as: osseuropa@hq.nasa.gov

The email address to comment on the Pluto-Kuiper Express mission is: osspluto@hq.nasa.gov

Be sure to "cc" your elected officials and local newspapers as well.

STOP CASSINI Web Site
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/cassini.htm

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