Rand Simberg points out a little blurb at Space.com’s Astronotes (entry dated January 6) regarding the anti-New Horizons protest Bruce Gagnon scheduled for today at CCAFS.
Unfortunately, Leonard David seems to have done Bruce the favor of filtering out his standard suite of fearmongering talking points, making him sound almost reasonable and leaving me with little material for pithy fiskery. He even left out the obligatory buttressing commentary from the other luddite Bobbsey Twin, journalism professor Karl Grossman. (Is it me, or is it odd that Mr. David — a space journalist, and thus someone one might fairly assume to be pro-space — should be helpfully tidying up the ravings of an anti-space moonbat?)
About the only funny bit here is Bruce’s quote at the end:
“We might have escaped Cassini, we might escape New Horizons, but with plans to put nuclear reactors on the Moon to power bases there in the coming years, NASA will be launching a host of these missions. One thing we have learned is that sooner or later, space technology can fail.”
Translation: I make the same doom and gloom predictions every time nuclear material is launched into space, sooner or later I’m going to be right! Just you wait and see! Well, stopped clocks are right twice a day, too, Chicken Little.
On the other hand…it makes me wonder if maybe there isn’t a clever tactical calculation in Bruce’s repeated (and repeatedly wrong) prognostications. While he has been stating his opposition to the launch, Bruce doesn’t seem to have been pimping today’s protest much at all — it has been listed for two weeks or thereabouts on the GNAW-N-PIS website, but none of his four blog posts on New Horizons in the past month (1, 2, 3, 4) have mentioned it. His earliest mention of the January 7 protest on Globenet (Yahoo group registration required) was posted on December 28, while a November 17 appeal for funds to run ads in central Florida newspapers expressing opposing the launch conspicuously omits mention of today’s protest. Given how little advanced publicity he’s given it, I won’t be surprised to learn that few people turned out for the event (nor will I be surprised when in the next few days he posts a triumphal after-action report touting how large and “successful” the micro-protest was…Bruce’s protest events are always large and “successful”, even when they’re not).
However, it may not be the size of the protest that matters so much as it having happened, and Bruce being on record as opposing the launch beforehand. If by chance something should go wrong with New Horizons, Bruce and his pals could then use the incident — and their established (however minuscule) opposition to the launch — as the basis for primly saying: “See? I told you so!“. In the media feeding frenzy that would likely ensue after any launch accident with New Horizons (regardless of the actual dangers), the panicked bleatings of the mission’s opponents would be transmuted into prophetic but regrettably unheeded warnings, the shrill “This time for sure!” becoming the sage “I’ve been warning about this for years.”
This pseudo-prescience is a potentially more effective means of demonstrating to potential supporters the righteousness of one’s cause and one’s fitness to lead it than the after-the-fact “they should have known” reasoning exhibited after Katrina. And that would seem to put Bruce in an uncomfortable position — because it would provide a very public event that could be exploited to validate his long-standing opposition to launching nuclear material, nothing would help his cause and enhance his name recognition and the like as much as the very sort of accident he claims to be working to avert.