If all goes well hours before dawn Monday, a Titan IV-B rocket will send NASA’s Cassini space probe on a seven-year trip to Saturn. Scientists will be a step closer to learning the truth about the mysterious and chaotic ringed planet.
But if all goes absolutely and horribly wrong, the chaos could be much closer to home:
Warnings to stay indoors. Buses not letting children off at school because of radiation concerns. Fire alarms ringing in schools. Forty radiation-monitoring teams scurrying about with souped-up Geiger counters. People crowding hospitals out of fear of radiation sickness.
Plutonium panic.
Cassini carries 72 pounds of plutonium fuel, the most launched into space. If an explosion reduces that plutonium to dust, it becomes breathable and toxic.
If something goes wrong, the government, which spent $50 million studying the environmental effects of an accident and two years preparing for it, has this advice: Don’t panic.
“Go inside your buildings, or your houses or your cars and just await emergency announcements. Turn on the radio,” advises Kennedy Space Center safety director Joel Reynolds.
NASA and U.S. Department of Energy officials say it’s unlikely the super-hardened plutonium–nestled inside casings within casings–will spew more than a thimble full of dust in an accident.
But Cassini foes say there will be more dust than NASA predicts. They say people may get cancer.
“People on the Space Coast are going to be afraid,” said Bruce Gagnon, leader of the opposition to Cassini. “If this plutonium dust did break apart and was scattered by the winds. . . . Forget your homeowner’s insurance.”
Most Cassini foes, who have staged daily demonstrations, will not be at the launch site Monday. Many are leaving town to be safe, Gagnon said. But some may try stopping the launch by trespassing onto the Air Station’s safety zone. Air Force policy is not to launch a rocket if someone is in that area–which includes all of the air base, much of Kennedy Space Center and nearby coastal waters.
NASA officials say the chance of a plutonium release during launch is 1 in 476.
There will be 10 radiation monitoring teams on the grounds of Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Station and more than 30 in two adjacent counties.
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An Energy Department medical team is ready to cope with potential radiation sickness. Beverly Cook, the department’s nuclear space fuel manager for Cassini, expects people to show up at hospitals complaining of radiation sickness, even if they don’t have it.