NASA Commits ‘Wanton Pollution’ of Solar System

opinion by Jackie Alan Giuliano, PhD (via ENS)

The world is a sacred vessel

Not to be acted upon.

Whoever acts upon it destroys it.

Whoever grasps it loses it.

—Lao Tzu (from the Tao Te Ching)

I spent nearly 20 years working in America’s space program. At the time, I saw it as a grand dream, an opportunity for humanity to unite in the exploration of the universe. I defended the expenditures, pointing out the dramatic benefits that could be derived from finding a common cause for the Earth’s people.

But tragically, as with nearly everything touched by the US government, waste on a grand scale became the norm. I found I could no longer support an enterprise that condoned the intentional destruction of multi-million dollar spacecraft and the wanton pollution of other worlds in our solar system.

Once again the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), while under intense criticism for the vast cost overruns of the International Space Station program, has decided to prematurely end the life of one of the human race’s grandest achievements.

Later this year, controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA’s lead center for the robotic exploration of the Solar System, and the facility where I spent many years, will upload the last command sequence to the Galileo spacecraft. Launched in October 1989, the Galileo craft has been in orbit around the gas giant Jupiter since 1995, sending back incredible pictures and data, advancing our knowledge of our neighborhood in space. The program cost $1.4 billion.

Because funding technically runs out next year, NASA will not only stop communicating with this amazing, and expensive, machine, but it will intentionally crash it into the atmosphere of Jupiter in September 2003, dispersing its power source of 34.4 pounds of radioactive plutonium-238 and other hazardous wastes. Even though the heat from the plutonium would keep generating power for the craft for many years, once the propellant used to point the spacecraft at Earth runs out, commands could no longer be sent and data could not be received. The propellant is running out, but the timing of this ending is because of budgetary shortsightedness, not real needs.

Besides the incredible waste of prematurely destroying a craft that took years to build and to travel to another world, we are once again spreading our pollution to worlds about which we know very little. Galileo has been in orbit around Jupiter more than three times longer than its originally planned mission. The spacecraft has survived about three and a half times as much exposure to radiation from Jupiter’s radiation belts as it was designed to withstand. It has taken 33 loops around Jupiter, flying near the closest moon, Io, six times and near the other three of Jupiter’s planet-sized moons - Europa, Ganymede and Callisto - a total of 27 times.

Galileo’s prime mission was to spend two years studying Jupiter, its moons and its magnetic environment. When that original mission ended in December 1997, it was followed by a two year extended mission, scheduled to end in January 2000. The mission was extended again.

While NASA tries to make these extensions sound like gifts that have already made use of a spacecraft living beyond its expected lifetime, they are actually the result of the budget battles that constantly go on in Congress. Rather than seek approval for what is the true life of the mission, NASA budgeters play the game by only asking for a couple of years funding at a time, hoping for a more favorable budget climate when that end of mission comes. This philosophy has contributed to the astronomical cost overruns of the space station program.

I worked on the Galileo mission before it was launched, and we all knew it would last beyond the two years Congress was being asked to fund. It was hard to constantly manipulate the truth by telling the outside world that the spacecraft mission was only two years long. We all knew that we weren’t going to be spending 10 years building the spacecraft and taking six years to get to Jupiter, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to just take data for two years. We knew that NASA would get more money when that time was up. But the game was afoot and unstoppable.

Since oceans have been discovered beneath the frozen ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa, suggesting the possibility of the early beginnings of life, these concerns sound worth noting.

But while the concerns about contaminating Europa with Earth microbes are interesting, even though the possibility of the spacecraft making it there on its own are remote, it is disappointing that NASA doesn’t have any concern about dumping plutonium or our space junk around the Solar System.

NASA and JPL project managers look at the environmental assessment process and any comments from the public about spreading our waste in space as a bother. Also, engineers are trained to downplay risks. They consider a risk of one in a million insignificant. But to a layperson who has seen the results of thousands of environmental accidents where the risk was supposedly very low, one in a million seems quite possible.

Of course, how can we get anyone to be concerned about the possible harmful effects of dumping our radioactive waste on other worlds when modern science condones illness, cancer, and even deaths if they advance a technology or turn a profit. Our culture has made it OK to release a drug if the side effects “only” kill two percent of the users under certain circumstances.

NASA’s new administrator should clean up the sloppy goal selection process for space exploration missions and insist that future mission designs include ways to stop spreading our hazardous waste around the Solar System. Otherwise, future space explorers will find worlds contaminated in ways we can’t possibly imagine. To act on this, tell your Congressional representatives that NASA’s space exploration policies need to be cleaned up. We must stop polluting other worlds.

Jackie Alan Giuliano, PhD, is a writer and teacher in Seattle.