Ode to a Plutonian Ode

It’s practically beyond belief to see the initial stunning photographs of Pluto we’ve received through the 12-watt transmitter of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, 3 billion miles away. High resolutions of icy mountains as tall as Hyndman and a toy box full of planetary mysteries for mission astronomers to gleefully analyze in coming years – and this success merely 112 years after the Wright Brothers.

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Meanwhile, here on solid Earth, most people have forgotten the protests over the 24 pounds of Idaho made plutonium that’s powering this extraordinary mission. According to the January 16, 2006 N.Y Times: “NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy put the probability of an early-launch accident that would cause plutonium to be released at 1 in 350 chances.”

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The Times also reported in 2006 that NASA estimated the cost of decontamination, should there be a serious accident with plutonium released during the launch, at anywhere from $241 million to $1.3 billion per square mile, depending on the size of the area.

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 This is not a farfetched scenario. Of 28 U.S. space missions that used plutonium preceding 2006, three have had accidents, the worst in 1964 in which a plutonium-powered satellite broke up and spread toxic radioactivity wide over our planet.

Interestingly, soon after the European Space Agency begin using solar energy to power spacecraft past Jupiter, NASA retracted its earlier claims that plutonium would be needed for spacecraft to be operational beyond Mars and admitted that solar will work in deep space. This of course, affects the future of the highly profitable market of INL plutonium production.

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Recently, I read an interesting Reddit article that speculated about the increasing speeds we will probably achieve in future space travel. The author suggested that within a few generations, we may very well develop probes capable of reaching the Outer Oort Cloud within a few days. Not only that, but we could even possess the capability of capturing an earlier probe and then retrieving it for education purposes to a contemporary space museum.

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If humanity achieves this ability in another 112 years, I would suggest to future generations that they do not return the New Horizons spacecraft full of deadly plutonium back to a museum on fragile Earth, but rather create a safe outpost museum on faraway Pluto.

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And if you’ve read his book Plutonian Ode in which leading Beat Poet Alan Ginsberg spoke broadly about this most deadly element under the sun, I think you’ll agree he probably would have smiled at the idea.