Moments later... NASA/JPL live internet video feed moments after the successful fly-by of the Cassini Space Probe. Graphic shows the speed of the craft, based on Doppler radar. Full story below... and full commentary at Burning Man.

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Special Update
Freewheeling Rocket Scientists Guide Cassini Past the Earth

Pasadena, CA | (c) Planet Waves Digial Media

....Scientists at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory successfully guided the Cassini Space Probe past the Earth Tuesday night, Aug. 17, sending it on its way to Saturn and avoiding a potential disaster in which 72 pounds of plutonium, used aboard the spacecraft to generate electrical power, could have entered the Earth's atmosphere.

....Cassini, which has cost taxpayers $3.4 billion to create and operate, was launched from Earth in late 1997, and its flight path took it on two orbits of Venus and then back to the Earth yesterday, in a series of maneuvers called "gravity assist boosts." Using the "slingshot effect," these maneuvers increase the speed of the spacecraft without using additional rocket fuel. Cassini approached Earth at about 35,000 mph, increasing its speed to about 46,000 mph by stealing a tiny bit of our planet's momentum. The probe will help scientists study Saturn, and its largest moon, Titan.

....At its closest point over the South Pacific, the probe came within 727 miles of our planet, and was visible from Easter Island and Pitcairn Island. Relatively late in the mission, probably as a safety precaution, the government decided to increase the fly-by distance from about 450 miles to 725 miles; the actual distance was just slightly more.

....To accomplish this "flyby" maneuver, NASA had to risk accidental re-entry of the remote-controlled vehicle into Earth's atmosphere, which would have burned up the spacecraft and vaporized its payload of deadly plutonium, spreading it throughout every continent. Seventy-two pounds of plutonium is enough to give 34 billion people lung cancer. According to Dr. Helen Caldicott of Physicians for Social Responsibility, it takes only one-millionth of a gram to induce the disease. Current Earth population is estimated at about 7 billion.

...."This is more plutonium than has ever been put on a space device, and also with no good reason," investigative journalist Karl Grossman said in a Planet Waves interview Tuesday. Grossman is a full professor of journalism at the State University of New York.

....While press in other countries has covered Cassini extensively, the U.S. media was all but silent on the issue yesterday, and only a few scant stories have appeared over the months. Most people got their information about Cassini over the Internet (see the Planet Waves index of Cassini websites). Grossman has won nearly a dozen awards for his coverage of the nuclear space program, including Cassini, from Project Censored, a university-based project which calls attention to issues ignored by the national media. He is author of the book The Wrong Stuff, an exposé on nuclear space shots.

....Grossman said that there are alternatives to using nuclear power in space. "Europeans right now are readying the Rosetta space probe to go beyond the orbit of Jupiter and rendezvous with a comet using advanced solar panels. At a distance of 675 million kilometers from the Sun, Rosetta will use solar power to generate 500 watts of electricity, while NASA is using plutonium to generate 745 watts of electricity at a similar distance, and at the same time threatening life on Earth," Grossman said.

....Advances in microtechnology will allow components to function on less and less energy in the future.

...YYet a report by the congressional General Accounting Office documents NASA's plans to use plutonium on eight more similar shots despite the advent of advanced solar power. "They're going to do it again and again until they get it wrong," he said, referring to the inevitability of a major disaster at some point in the future. It was just over one year ago that NASA lost a milti-billion dollar spy satellite in a Titan rocket explosion -- the same kind of launch vehicle used to loft Cassini.

....An explosion on lift-off, or prior to the launch vehicle leaving the atmosphere, could contaminate large areas with plutonium. NASA environmental safety records indicate that it had plans to move the populations of cities if such a disaster occurred, or in case of an inadvertant reentry of the probe this week.

....Grossman became interested in the nuclear space program, particularly involving missions of the Space Shuttle, in the mid-1980s, but did not think it was an important story because the odds of a Space Shuttle disaster were estimated at one in 100,000 by NASA.

...."Those are pretty slim odds, which is why I didn't do anything, and the same reason that media today are either very quiet or totally compliant," he said. "Like the reporters today who are not doing anything, I just said, well, one in 100,000, that's not worth a story." That was until he was driving to work to teach an investigative reporting class at the State University of New York on Jan. 28 1986, when he heard on his car radio that the Challenger had blown up.

....Grossman knew that the Challenger's next mission would have been to loft the Ulysses Space Probe, which had 24 pounds of plutonium aboard, into space. He immediately wrote a front-page editorial for The Nation magazine called "The Lethal Shuttle."

...."NASA changed the odds right away," Grossman said, explaining that the agency suddenly decided chances of a launch accident were really one in 76, not one in 100,000. He said that a scientist working on Cassini has admitted to him that these odds are "pulled out of a hat" for public relations purposes and are really meaningless numbers. Chances of a flyby accident with Cassini last night, for example, were estimated by NASA at one in 1.2 million.

...."It's scandalous. If there is another accident, it will be criminal," he said, adding that of 41 space nuclear shots by Russian and American space agencies, there have been six accidents, the most serious one over the Northwest Territories of Canada in 1978, and the most recent in 1996 involving a Russian Mars space probe with plutonium on board broke up over Chile and Bolivia. "Accidents have happened, and you can expect them to continue to happen."

....The ill-fated Apollo 13 mission needed to jettison its plutonium payload prior to re-entering Earth's atmosphere in case the capsule burned up on re-entry -- a fact not covered in the popular film. And in 1964, a spacecraft called SNAP 9-A accidentally burned up in the atmosphere, spreading its 2.1 pounds of specially tagged plutonium to every corner of every continent, which some scientists feel is at least partially responsible for the high levels of lung cancer on the planet today.++

 

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Planet Waves
Sign-by-Sign Horoscope for Aug. 20, 1999

ARIES (March 21-April 19)
There are generally two ways to define ourselves; one is to do so against something else, and the other is to create an independent identity based on personal values, ideals and beliefs. At times, both are necessary, and while we often criticize "reactionary" people and politics, it really can be quite valuable to have someone or something against which to sharpen and hone yourself. For the moment that process is finished for you, and it's important that you do as much of your reality-checking and establishment of your ideas as internally as possible now, holding to what you feel is true and not backing down even if, for example, you find that people suddenly start to agree with you all over the place. That doesn't matter; what you think does.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)
Be prepared to stand up for what you really believe in, especially where a close personal relationship is concerned. Most so-called humans walking the planet's surface are pretty much ready to roll over and drop dead at the least threat of confrontation. When people exhibit strong emotional reactions, they are less often genuinely upset about something legitimate and more often trying to manipulate others. While you sensitive-types are often willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, this would be a good time to assume that the motives behind any outburst are far from wholesome, and not designed in your best interests.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20)
Your words and your ideas are gold. Each and every one of them, and right now, not in some starry future when you make it onto the New York Times bestseller list or win awards for your brilliant design concepts. Every career is built slowly, but there are those moments when amazing things are possible, and this is one of them. So pay attention to your ideas; write them down; record them; listen to yourself. If no one has ever taken what you say or think seriously, it would behoove them to do so now. And if you're already attaining some success in a career involving your brain, this is surely your moment to shine like the Sun.

CANCER (June 21-July 22)
You will have to trust that a certain long-stuck door involving your relationship to personal wealth has indeed opened. But I don't suggest you sit around waiting for the results; rather, take this rare opportunity to begin your side in the process; for example, setting up some kind of savings plan, which is merely a container to accumulate your financial gains, which are ever the mercurial (fast-changing) substances and need help becoming stabilized. I also suggest beginning a program of raising your prices, ceasing to do work for free (especially for people whose petty cash fund exceeds your rent) and making long-term plans for the way things ought to be, and in truth, are likely to become.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)
These could be some touchy weeks coming up for you, though I suggest you not take your state of heart or mind too seriously. There is very little you can do about the current situation but accept it for what it is, and besides, what's really unfolding are a series of major internal adjustments in the wake of last week's total solar eclipse in your birth sign. Remember that life is a process that unfolds over many years, and that at the moment, you are compensating for and catching up from some kind of inordinate delay. At such times, we can feel very insecure, but really you have every reason to trust life.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
You can expect an unpredictable and at times difficult few weeks where matters of personal security and emotional well-being are concerned. Yet there are, as always, at least two ways to utilize the energies indicated by astrology. One is to get trapped in the stresses of potentially difficult aspects, and the other is to attend to the healing and development processes they are indicative of. Rather awesome progress is possible for you, if you will only address your anger consciously, refuse to let the past define the future, and consider the value of doing something not so typically Virgo -- dreaming of the new possibilities.

LIBRA (Sep. 23-Oct. 22)
No matter how preoccupied with personal matters you may be at the moment, put anything unpleasant out of your mind and clear room in your calendar for social affairs, which I suggest you attend even if you're not feeling quite up to it. Success is very much at hand, and to make success real, you're going to need to show your face. What you have accomplished so far is more impressive than you imagine, but remember that in most professional affairs, who you are is far more important than what you have done. Even if you were to understate your achievements, you would still sound quite impressive, so just be you and watch what happens.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
The next few days will represent a kind of test of your growth in the part of your life you consider "spiritual." Now, as far as I am concerned, there are not many valid distinctions between what is spiritual and what is anything else, but there are those aspects of being that we do consider relating to the progress of the soul's or the higher self's journey, and right now you are seeing how they operate in real life, and in real time. Given the choice, do you forgive, or condemn? Given the option, do you hold on, or let go? And knowing there is a difference, do you allow your emotions to run your life, or do you rely on your feelings?

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 23-Dec. 21)
You are working up to something, and part of that working-up involves dealing with fear. A big part of the recent eclipse process has been throwing open doors that certainly have the potential to allow thundering blasts of power into our dimension of reality, and power makes Wee People very nervous. Yet it's also true that on Earth, there seems so much over which to worry or freak out. Now is the time to work with your fear, because your fear is a very important teacher in that it will reveal the true inner workings of your mind as they least serve you. Deal with fear now and power will be a lot more comfortable when you suddenly figure out you have some.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)
It's important that you take this time as an opportunity to sort out the differences between what you value and believe, and what others value and believe. This is an exercise considered daring, dangerous and thus rarely performed by members of our stupendous culture, but I assure you, it will serve you very well to make some clear distinctions between what others think is best for you and what you know is important to you. The fact that they "know" and that you are "experimenting" is irrelevant. They don't know, and life is a process of trial and error, and powerful people have an obligation to assist those who are aspiring to better things -- especially if those powerful people claim to love you.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 19-Feb. 18)
I got some interesting mail from an Aquarian reader who said that she was disappointed that the recent eclipse didn't do much to help her strained relationship. "Everything I read said that the situation should come to a head and be resolved during the eclipse period, but nothing's happened yet. We're still going round and round. Am I being impatient? I thought that with us being an Aquarius and a Scorpio that we would definitely see something happen." My question for all Aquarians: Are you really, truly and with a blazing heart expressing your independence in this life? Are you really doing what you want, and what you need? For only from this perspective is any real resolution possible; compromises are not.

PISCES (Feb. 19-Mar. 20)
It's essential that you work very efficiently right now, doing what you do well even better, not wasting time and making plenty of space and time to reflect and cultivate some of the new processes that have recently gotten under way. This is a time of changing routines for you, and one of the new ones I suggest you add is something known as time to think and feel. We are assured by all kinds of social philosophers that in our age, this is impossible, and that Westerners are so messed up we are incapable of pausing. But you are not incapable, and if you take the time, the rewards, I am rather certain, will be astonishing.

For the Faithful
I haven't had time yet to read all of the mail you sent about your eclipse experiences, but I wanted to share mine with you briefly. I found the days leading up to the grand cross/total solar eclipse to be a wild frenzy of activity, and what felt like endless outer demands. However, I closed my office and got myself to a quiet spot for the alignment, deep in my favorite forest, and the world seemed silent in those hours. By that afternoon, it was clear to me that I was on the other side of something very important, as if some kind of energetic weather had shifted. After a few tense days of what felt like aftershocks and reverberations, my existence felt like a whole new life, and the dreams and potentials I've been nurturing felt more real and tangible than ever. I spent the weekend at Loving More magazine's east coast conference, where I facilitated workshops on jealousy and selflove/masturbation. I know that eclipses take time to develop, so we need to keep watching ourselves and our world for developments that seem to arise from August 1999 as a central fulcrum point. But congratulations -- if you're reading this, you made it! ++

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