Nuking NASA

Project Prometheus is getting a lot of attention these days. Dan Schrimpsher has documented the latest episode of un-informed congressmen making hay out of nothing.

Project Prometheus is a NASA project meant to test the use of a Nuclear reactor in space. It's not nuclear propulsion. Nuclear propulsion, like the kind in the NASA project called Orion involves using nuclear detonations to create thrust. However Gas Core Nuclear Rockets were also developed by NASA that were a lot more practical but still used nuclear material.
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, representing the 4th District of Georgia, is spearheading an effort to find like-minded lawmakers to question the building and deployment of a nuclear propulsion rocket and to protect the public from the potential of a catastrophic nuclear accident posed by the Prometheus Project.

Project Prometheus involves the use of a Nuclear Reactor, not a Nuclear Rocket. Cynthia is not the only one this confused. I wish I could say Canadian politicians are more aware of space related issues but they aren't. We just had a Premier of an Atlantic province, a multi-millionaire cable king, that jumped at the 1 in a million chance of an ABM test striking an offshore oil platform.

Then the good Congresswoman mused about Solar Power being a suitable replacement. This got this response from Dan:
What? Solar power? What does she think NASA uses, unleaded? I think somebody needs to point out to Congresswoman McKinney the farther away from the Sun you get, the less solar energy you have. Solar power requires a star fairly close by. In this case, nuclear is an alternative energy source.

Nuclear reactors are the only way we could power long duration, long distance probes. Nothing, ruling out an act of God, will ever change that.

These Leftist hippy flower power fanaticals need to get it through their skulls that the cold war is over and no matter how hard they try to find an anti-nuke cause in Project Prometheus all they do is embarrass themselves and expose how little they infact know.

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