MAKING ALL WOMEN PREGNANT

I fully agreed with MacNelly, by far my favorite cartoonist, when in a drawing called "Great Explorers" he put Voyager 2 along Ericson, Columbus, Magellan, Lewis and Clark. The time of its launch, August 1977, was a rare opportunity (once in 176 years) in the constellation of planets to let it make the "Grand Tour" past Jupiter in July 1979, Saturn in August 1981, Uranus in January 1986, and finally past Neptune on August 24 of this year. Most readers will have seen the wondrous pictures radioed home while its computer was swiveling the TV camera, panning time ex-posures of up to 15 seconds without blurring. The signals, traveling at the speed of light, took some 4 hours to reach the antennas of the deep space network in Australia, Spain and California. They were sent out with a power of 22 watts; where did it come from?

An equally ambitious launch is now being prepared for October 12, 1989. The spacecraft Galileo, or "Jupiter Shuttle," will make use of the special relative position of earth and Jupiter to travel along a complicated path: from the earth to a multiple fly-by in loops near Jupiter, in which it will pump up its energy (not unlike a child on a swing increasing the magnitude of the sweep with every repetition) until it has enough energy to leave Jupiter's gravitational field and set out for the earth, with a final fly-by of only 120 miles from its native planet three years after its launch.

The source for electric power will again be plutonium; solar power is unusable not only because of the distance (5 astr. units, or ?5 times lower solar power than on earth), but because of the long periods spent on Jupiter's night side.

Plutonium, the "most toxic substance known" is less toxic than caffeine when ingested, and less toxic than the natural element radium when inhaled, and I am as sick and tired of repeating it, as you must be of reading it. Plus all the other points [AtE Sep 89]-- for new subscribers..

The latest story by the brainwashers is that "as little as 5 kg of plutonium, if properly distributed, could kill every man, woman and child on this planet. Statements of this kind will duly impress all dull-witted parrots, of which, alas, there are fearsome numbers. I won't waste time on the small amount of plutonium in Galileo, nor on the "littleness" of 5 kg; but the weasel "if properly distributed" is worthy of comment.

"If properly distributed," the sperm of a single man can make hundreds of millions of women, and perhaps even all 2.5 billion of them on this planet pregnant. As with plutonium, however, the "proper distribution" might run into difficulties.

[More: DoE, SP-100 GES Program Office (Wash., DC 20545), Report DEP/NE-52(GTN), SP-1OO Space Reactor Safety. (The SP-100 is under development, uses U 235 for fuel, and will not yet be on board the Galileo.)]