Space agency and bro billionaires conspire to trash the moon

By Linda Pentz Gunter

Russia just crash-landed on the moon. India’s lunar rover is trundling across its surface. Are their intentions purely benign? Just about science? Or something more?

There are no such doubts lingering over US lunar plans, however. The mistakes made on Planet Earth will now be repeated on the moon.

In his fascinating and frightening 2012 book — A Short History of Nuclear Folly — that I somehow maddeningly missed on publication, Rudolph Herzog writes:

“There are places where radioactive substances have no business being. One of them is space.”

Herzog, son of the famous film director Werner, and whose book, written in German, was translated into English in 2013, details a whole panoply of terrifying nuclear accidents and near-misses, including disasters that could have befallen us in and from space.

But no lessons have been learned and no such warnings heeded.

Consequently, we now learn that NASA and the US Defense Department have awarded nuclear weapons company, Lockheed Martin, a contract to build a nuclear powered rocket to speed humans on their way to Mars. 

“Higher thrust propulsion” is what Lockheed Martin is seeking to develop, but is travel speed to Mars really the only motivation? Of course not. The Pentagon admits it is also keen to develop nuclear reactor technology that will power satellites with more “fuel-efficient fuel sources” so that they can maneuver in space in such a way as to “make them more difficult for adversaries to target” reported the Washington Post.

As Herzog recounts in his book, we have been here before, and the outcome could have been catastrophic. In his chapter, Flying Reactors, he recounts how in the 1960s, the then Soviet Union developed miniature nuclear reactors to power their RORSAT military surveillance satellites. At the end of their life they were simply blasted into deeper space where their radioactive load would decay far from human exposure risk. Or, at least, that is what was supposed to happen.

Needless to say, eventually one of the Soviet reactor-powered satellites failed to follow orders and instead began plummeting toward Earth. The Soviets warned the US it could crash in North America on January 24, 1978. 

Panicked headlines ensued as the media began to speculate on worst case scenario crash landing locations. As Herzog relates, “Time magazine calculated that if the satellite had orbited the Earth one more time it could have crashed in New York City in rush hour.”

Instead, luck prevailed, although not for northwestern Canada where it eventually reached Earth in the middle of the Arctic winter, prompting a challenging and month-long search party to find it and clean up the “mess”.

Despite this, the Soviets continued right on and lost several more of these Cosmos satellites, although none, apparently, crashed on land.

Two days before the Lockheed Martin news broke, NASA had announced a literally lunatic plan to trash the Moon with nuclear waste. It’s as if our species has learned nothing at all after ruining our own planet to the point of extinction as a livable organism.

A total of $150 million in contracts are to be awarded by NASA to “build landing pads, roads and habitats on the lunar surface, use nuclear power for energy, and even lay a high-voltage power line,” reported the Washington Post.

Yes, the USA is going to pave the moon and put up a parking lot.

The endgame is to allow human beings to live on the moon for extended periods of time. And to contaminate it with nuclear waste while they’re about it. And to dig it up and pave it over and, most absurdly, to “Iive off the land” as one NASA administrator put it.

That means implementing an extractive industry to mine the moon for construction materials such as metals, as well as to find water. And, presumably, to dispose of all the waste on other parts of the moon not targeted for human living spaces.

A major recipient of NASA’s lunatic largesse was, needless to say, one of the bro billionaires who are already heavily invested in the futile and expensive space odyssey that will eventually allow human habitation on the moon and Mars (presumably for a handful of other bro billionaires and their cronies.) So Amazon and Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos, is first in line for a $43.7 million handout to support these goals.

Solar arrays for the moon are also in the offing, but this does little to nullify the awful prospect of the moon turning into Thneed-Ville (see Dr. Seuss’s seminal book on industrial destruction, The Lorax).

As these latest NASA announcements reveal, without actually spelling it out, the agenda here goes well beyond the thrill of human space exploration. We are arming the heavens and that, as Herzog points out, can only go badly.

The madness of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in space has been well documented in War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space by Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath and The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, by Karl Grossman.We also examine the more sinister agenda behind all this in the Beyond Nuclear Handbook — The U.S. Space Force and the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war in space.

But there is also another question: What gives the United States the right to decide, unilaterally, that it will colonize the moon and Mars? When did the US annex these celestial territories? Human beings have for centuries waxed lyrical and poetic about the moon as it shines down on us with its magical and ethereal glow. But do any of us own it? Surely it belongs in the commons and we, as a collective species, should decide whether or not it can be plundered and desecrated by one country alone, or, preferably, not at all?

Ironically, after all the sci-fi fantasies about evil Martians invading Planet Earth, it turns out that it is we humans who are about to invade Mars and the moon, bringing our heedless and destructive ways with us. And all this, while we leave a spectacularly beautiful planet behind us to decay and degenerate as a result of our selfish greed.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and curates Beyond Nuclear International. 

Headline photo of the moon by osde8info/Creative Commons.