Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....
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Wednesday, February 15, 2006
MOONBASE NUCLEAR
I got home at midnight last night after flying in from Albuquerque, New Mexico. We held two days of protests outside the 23rd Symposium on Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion held at the Hilton Hotel and sponsored by the University of New Mexico's Nuclear Engineering Department.
Bob Anderson and I went into the symposium display room yesterday before the protest began to see what the latest "stuff" was available. We both got our picture taken at the NASA booth and they inserted the photo inside a spacesuit on a postcard with a moon base in the background. Unlike the photo above, all the moon bases we saw in the conference display room had no solar panels. Everything was nuclear. Nuclear rockets took you to the moon and when you get there all power supplies were nuclear. Same with the Mars displays...nuclear rockets to Mars, nuclear powered rovers now driving around Mars, and eventually, nuclear powered mining colonies there too.
Besides NASA, Lockheed Martin and Boeing had big display areas. So did the Department of Energy and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama where the nuclear rocket is under development. The Idaho National Laboratory had a space nuclear battery display called "Reliable Energy for Space Exploration." NIAC (NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts) had a display called "Grand Visions for Colonization of Space." Included in their PowerPoint presentation were things like "Cyclical Visits to Mars via Astronaut Hotels" and "Redesigning Living Organisms to Survive on Mars".
While in Albuquerque a woman attended my talk, and joined us on the picket line outside the Hilton Hotel, whose father had been one of the Nazi space scientists smuggled into the U.S. after World War II under "Operation Paperclip." She told me that when she learned of the Holocaust at the age of 18 she asked her mother about it. Her mother replied that "It was necessary" and gave her a copy of Readers Digest that had an article explaining that position. Her father was a key member of the Nazi team that created the V-1 and V-2 rockets that Hitler used to terrorize cities like London, Paris, and Brussels with near the end of the war. When the U.S. Army brought the Nazi's to the U.S. they brought along 100 copies of the V-2 rocket that were used to create the U.S. Space Program.
The amount of money now being poured into plans to “colonize” space are staggering. The ultimate goal is to mine the planetary bodies for resources like helium-3, gold, magnesium, cobalt and uranium. The aerospace industry will pocket the profits after you, the taxpayer paid for all the research and development costs. Corporate welfare run amok.
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