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In reply to the discussion: NASA wants to put a nuclear power plant on the moon [View all]bigtree
(94,306 posts)Last edited Tue Nov 30, 2021, 06:55 PM - Edit history (2)
...it's a stalking horse for nuclear weapons in space, space based lasers.
It just is. Has been so since Reagan.
More than that, it's an excuse to develop plutonium pit plants, here on Earth, which would then be used to develop their mini-nukes.
It's going to be near impossible to connect the dots enough at this point to make this clear to most Americans who can't see beyond the cool tech and NASA's promises to the obvious military implications.
NASA's nuclear space 'Prometheus Project' is based on an archaic notion that began in the '50's with a space project named Orion. Project Orion was a propulsion system that depended on exploding atomic bombs roughly two hundred feet behind the space vehicle. Orion was developed at the old General Dynamics Corporation, under the guidance of several former Manhattan Project scientists.
In the late 1950's, Freeman Dyson, physicist, educator, and author, joined the Orion Project research team. The project's participants proposed exploding atomic bombs at regular intervals at very short distances behind a specially designed space ship in order to propel it to the Moon and other planets in the Solar System far more quickly and cheaply than with chemical-fuel rockets.
The motto for Orion was, 'Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970'; hauntingly reminiscent of NASA's schtick about Project Prometheus exploring Mars and Europa's moons. Orion ran out of money and needed the government's help. The military agreed to take up the project, but only on the condition that it adapt itself to a military purpose. The project was later abandoned because of uncertainty about the safety and efficacy of nuclear energy, and the high cost of the speculative program. Also, because the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 outlawed it. (will the new nuclear technology need new testing agreements between nations?)
"Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich," Dyson, 76, said, as he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion 2000. Dyson once commented that, "Project Orion is a monument to those who once believed, or still believe, in turning the power of these weapons into something else."
The Prometheus project was a cynical attempt to commit the nation to Rumsfeld's Star War's nonsense. Bush and Europa's moons; right. The Bush White House wanted you to know that their nuclear space project to Mars would prove new technologies for future NASA missions. Like space-based weaponry.
Despite that administration's and NASA's talk of Europa's moons, the Prometheus Project was intended to pave the way for the original Pentagon plan to mount nuclear reactors on space-based platforms to power their nuclear lasers. And of course, as the Space Command also asserts, ". . . the United States must also have the capability to deny America's adversaries the use of commercial space platforms, for military purposes."
Don't expect it to be easy to unravel whatever they're scheming now, since govt. propaganda is so readily and easily absorbed through myriad media outlets. But it's a sure bet that this is more than exploration, or some energy scheme to provide nuclear fission energy. We still haven't figured out how to dispose of the waste from the last generation of nuclear meddling, but full steam ahead.
Ask where the nuclear fuel will come from, and it won't come from mining the moon. It'll come from new uranium production, instead of the spent nuclear weapons they use today, something oh so coincidental to the military's ambition for mini nukes.
Unravel that Gordian knot and I'll be all like live long and prosper.