STOP CASSINI EARTH FLYBY A Call to Stop Space Missions that Endanger Life on Earth with their Plutonium Payloads

To reach Saturn, NASA has scheduled a series of gravity-assisted flybys or swingby maneuvers that accelerate the probe's speed. They scheduled a flyby around Venus for June 24, 1999. The Earth flyby would occur on August 18, 1999. They expect that the probe approached Earth at a speed in excess of 42,000 mph (64,000 kph). A flyby mishap could be catastrophic to life on Earth as we know it.

According to the NASA Environmental Impact Statement, in the event of an inadvertent reentry of the probe into the atmosphere of the Earth

"approximately 5 billion of the estimated 7 to 8 billion world population at the time of the swingbys could receive 99 per cent or more of the radiation exposure."

There is a debate among scientists about how much damage this amount of radiation would cause. NASA claims that only "2,300 health effects could occur over a 50-year period". Dr. Ernest Sternglass, professor emeritus of radiological physics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine said that "they underestimate the cancer alone by 2,000 to 4,000 times." According to Dr. Sternglass, there have been recent studies showing that low-levels of radioactivity are disproportionately more damaging than high levels.

Why is NASA using nuclear power on this mission? Solar could have been developed. Then we could "celebrate" deep space missions involving flybys.

Karl Grossman's book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat to Life documents the link between NASA and the Pentagon. Star Wars still exists, under a new name, but with the same plan to use nuclear power for energy and weapons orbiting Earth. The objective is to obtain the ultimate "high ground," for Earth warfare.

A major public response can help scuttle the plans of the Cassini Earth flyby and lead to the cancellation of future plutonium flights.

We have designed the NoFlyby Action Site to be a source of information and to coordinate strategic actions to expand public awareness about the dangers of the Cassini Earth flyby.

We are encouraging many groups to organize and act with us on June 24, 1998. Our united effort could help expose the significance of June 24, 1999, when NASA plans to direct the final swingby of Venus to accelerate the probe toward Earth. We call for Congressional hearings to investigate the risks vs rewards of the flyby maneuver and we question NASA's legal right to jeopardize our precious world.

Visit the NoFlyby Action Site at http://www.nonviolence.org/noflyby