Captain Scott Kelly wasn't kidding when he famously quipped that "space is hard". Even getting to the launch pad can prove to be a daunting challenge. Take the Cassini mission to study Saturn, for example. Despite an investment of $3.4 billion and nearly a decade of development, Cassini wound up being very nearly scuttled at the last minute by protesters who thought they knew better than a federal agency that has put multiple men on the moon. Geez guys, it was just 73 pounds of plutonium riding aboard that Saturn orbiter -- it wouldn't have caused that much damage had something gone horribly wrong at launch.
The Cassini mission, named after the 17th century Italian-French astronomer Jean-Dominique Cassini, marks the end of an era for NASA. It is likely the final "flagship-class" mission (those costing more than $1 billion) fielded by the space agency, if NASA Administrator Charles Bolden's claims from 2013 are still accurate. Other flagships included the vaunted Viking and Voyager missions as well as the Mars Curiosity rover and the Hubble Space telescope.
The Cassini mission started in 1982 when the European Science Foundation and NASA were still kicking around the idea of conducting their own respective solo missions to Saturn. Despite an impassioned report from astronaut Sally Ride in 1986, titled NASA Leadership and America's Future in Space, NASA and the ESA decided to go in halfsies on a joint mission.
However, by 1994, the mission's Congressional critics had begun to question the value of such a mission. The program had already eclipsed $3.3 billion in development costs -- that's $5 billion in 2017 money, adjusted for inflation, or about half of what we spent on the new James Webb Space Telescope. It was only because the ESA was also contributing funds to the mission and NASA was able to demonstrate that technology developed for Cassini would carry over to the Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Pathfinder and the Spitzer Space Telescope projects that this one was allowed to move forward.
That forward momentum came to a sudden halt three years later and just a day after then-President Clinton approved the mission. On October 4th, 1997, 800 protesters showed up (27 of which were arrested) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in opposition to the Cassini launch, which was then scheduled for October 7th.
The protesters were worried that, should the Titan IV rocket ferrying the orbiter into space suffer a catastrophic mishap during launch, it would vaporize the 73 pounds of Plutonium-238 that the Cassini carried and spread radioactive fallout across central Florida. The protesters were even more worried about that Cassini's upcoming gravitational slingshot, which would use the Earth's pull to accelerate the spacecraft into the outer solar system, could spread fallout across the globe, should Cassini accidentally re-enter orbit during the maneuver. The Green Party even went so far as to file a federal lawsuit against the government in a Hawaiian court to halt the launch.
"Winds can blow (plutonium) into Disney World, Universal City, into the citrus industry and destroy the economy of central Florida," Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York, told Mother Jones. He calculated that as many as a million people could be exposed to radiation if the launch went wrong.
The protesters' issue focused on, again, the 73 pounds of Plutonium-238 aboard the Cassini orbiter. This wasn't the first time that NASA had utilized radioactive materials as a power source for its long-endurance spacecraft -- New Horizons, Galileo, and Ulysses all carried similar setups -- but none had ever carried this much Pu-238 at one time before. The orbiter actually employed three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) during its 11-year mission. They're not for propulsion, mind you (that's what the gravitational slingshots were for), but rather a means to power the onboard scientific instruments for the duration of the trip.
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