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Of course, those protests to block Cassini’s launch failed and the mission launched successfully. Most of the event’s attendees came from outside the MIT community, though.) (I recall him speaking at one such event on the MIT campus in the weeks leading up to the launch when I was a graduate student there. NASA bureaucrats are bordering on scientific dishonesty,” he said in one such speech, claiming RTGs were riskier than NASA claimed they were. “I’m trying to tell you something very simple. Kaku spoke at various events warning of the threat Cassini posed to our environment if launched. “But now we face perhaps the greatest challenge of all: to leave the confines of the Earth and soar into outer space,” he writes in the book’s prologue.Īmong those who spoke out against the launch was Michio Kaku, a physics professor at the City University of New York who was only then emerging as a popular science communicator. Those activists, staging protests outside the gates of Cape Canaveral, in Washington, and elsewhere, feared that an accident during launch or on an Earth gravity assist needed to sling the spacecraft out to Saturn could cause radioactive contamination around the launch site or even throughout the atmosphere. In 1997, as NASA was preparing to launch the Cassini mission to Saturn, a small but vocal group of anti-nuclear activists protested its launch because the spacecraft was powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) with plutonium-238.
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