When 60 Minutes' Hysteria Nearly Shot Down a NASA Mission to Saturn - The Daily Beast

The investigative TV news show raised the alarm about the plutonium carried on the rocket.

For a spacecraft to reach the Jovian system with enough speed to eventually achieve orbit around Europa, it had to either launch from a powerful rocket (which NASA lacked, limiting spacecraft to a space shuttle deployment) or be absurdly light (which the required radiation armor rendered impossible).

Cassini carried three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which were powered by the decay of plutonium 238.

But 10 days before three and a half million pounds of rocket thrust put inches between Cassini and Earth, a much smaller number—60, as in 60 Minutes—nearly nailed NASA to the ground.

The correspondent’s opening line: “On October thirteenth, a Titan IV rocket is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral carrying seventy-two pounds of deadly plutonium; enough plutonium, in theory anyway, to administer a fatal dose to every man, woman and child on the face of the Earth several times over.”.

The segment featured a plutonium expert from the Department of Energy stating flatly that even if the rocket, spacecraft, and graphite-sealed, iridium-wrapped, ceramic plutonium blew up on the launch pad, it was literally impossible for the debris to do what protesters said it would.

Worse yet, Cassini would take a second swing at the peaceful people of planet Earth.

If it didn’t blow up on launch, it was set to follow a VVEJGA trajectory to boost its way toward Saturn: that is, two swings by Venus (V, V), and then it would play chicken with the Earth, and if something went wrong...

Nevertheless, NASA went forward with its reckless rocket launch likely to leave only cockroaches crawling the Earth (or whatever some future species would call this planet), and things were fine, as they had been for previous launches dozens of times over?

But the message from headquarters to those filing future space missions: if you must launch radioactive material, do not plan trajectories taking the spacecraft back to Earth for a gravity assist.

Ultimately, they found a relatively happy medium: a spacecraft that could launch direct and achieve the minimum science required to make a Europa expedition worthwhile, and NASA loved it, and then the cost doubled, and in 1999 Ed Weiler shot it dead.

From THE MISSION, or: How a Disciple of Carl Sagan, an Ex-Motocross Racer, a Texas Tea Party Congressman, the World's Worst Typewriter Saleswoman, California Mountain People, and an Anonymous NASA Functionary Went to War with Mars, Survived an Insurgency at Saturn, Traded Blows with Washington, and Stole a Ride on an Alabama Moon Rocket to Send a Space Robot to Jupiter in Search of the Second Garden of Eden at the Bottom of an Alien Ocean Inside of an Ice World Called Europa (A True Story) by David W