Monthly Archives: September 2023

It's getting increasingly crowded up past our atmosphere, with just of the most recent highlights being India's Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft successfully touching down on the moon's south pole in mid-August while Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed into the moon a week prior. Meanwhile, NASA scientists are scoping out alien rivers on Marsand Elon Musk continues to fantasize about constructing a Martian village.

While space missions have the potential to gather invaluable information about the composition of other planetary bodies that can help us better understand our place in the universe, they also come with environmental costs. Tens of thousands of pieces of space junk, including discarded pieces of spacecraft or debris, are currently floating around the solar system. Startups are already eyeing the moon and asteroids as potential locations to mine for metals. And Russia's failed mission literally left a sizable 10-meter crater on the moon.

It's only a matter of time before humans begin extracting resources in large quantities from space, and we need to protect a portion of our solar system as wilderness before that happens, says Tony Milligan, Ph.D., a philosopher at King's College London, who authored a paper addressing this with Martin Elvis, Ph.D., an astrophysicist at Harvard University.

"The idea that, 'There's a lot of the solar system there, there's no need to worry about it,' felt like the American mistake all over again," Milligan told Salon in a video call. "Which was, 'Well, this is a big country, there's never going to be a problem.' But before you know it, there's big competition for resources and the exponential growth becomes a big problem for everyone."

"The idea that, 'There's a lot of the solar system there, there's no need to worry about it,' felt like the American mistake all over again."

The Wilderness Act of 1964definedwilderness as "an area where the Earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." Indigenous populations had already been co-existing with wilderness areas for millennia when this act was passed, but the heavy carbon footprint of colonization had seriously depleted resources. The idea was to keep parts of natural landscapes protected from extraction untouched and pristine.

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In forests on Earth, even small patches of wilderness can serve as vital refuges for sensitive wildlife, allowing the land to restore itself if neighboring habitats are disturbed. Anyone who has stood deep in a forest, where machinery is prohibited and cell service is absent, can tell you there is intrinsic value in this raw stillness. One can only imagine the value of the stillness that could be experienced when visiting an untouched planetary body in our solar system.

"When we encounter something like the Blue Canyon [on Earth] we want to protect it and the environment," Milligan said. "Treating the moon and Mars as quarries is such a limited view."

"Treating the moon and Mars as quarries is such a limited view."

There are already protocols in place to ensure humans don't contaminate the Moon or other planetary bodies when exploring them. At the dawn of the space age in 1958, the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) was created to set standards that ensured planetary protection, with the agency serving as a kind of space guardian. In 1967, leading space race countries signed the Outer Space Treaty organized by the United Nations, which provides the basic framework for international space law. More recently in 2020, NASA published the Artemis Accords with seven other nations detailing our responsibilities to preserve outer space.

It's crucial to protect these planetary bodies because they can tell us so much about our own planet, said Athena Coustenis, Ph.D., chair of COSPAR's Panel for Planetary Protection. For example, exploring Venus helps us understand the greenhouse effect and could provide us with insights into how to protect Earth from global warming. However, natural climate patterns observed on Venus could be interrupted if humans contaminated it or began extracting elements that disrupted its natural composition, which happens plenty on this planet.

"We learn how our planet came to be, what it is, but more importantly, what it could become," Coustenis told Salon in a video call. "If we aren't careful about protecting our scientific capital, our scientific investment, in space, then we don't learn these things. We may just go on and destroy our planet."

Using patterns in population growth and how humans have previously exploited resources, Elvis and Milligan suggest that a maximum of one-eighth of the asteroid belt be mined for iron in the coming centuries and that the remaining seven-eighths be protected. If the demand for iron continues to grow at a similar rate as it has been since the Industrial Revolution, they calculate that humans could use more than a million times more than all of the iron ore reserves currently on Earth within 400 years.

"Once you go past that, you're on a very rapid road to using it all and therefore having an enormous economic crisis," Elvis told Salon in a video call. "It's like a tripwire. It's a warning."

For some, inhabiting other planetary bodies in our solar system is a question of "when," not "if."Anticipating that different stakeholders will race to monetize resources on the moon, Mars and beyond based on human beings' track record Elvis says these questions of preservation need to be considered beforehand to avoid conflict. After all, just 2.7% of the contiguous U.S. remains protected as designated wildernesstoday.

The goal is to be more conservative this time around, using what we have learned about resource depletion here on Earth, Elvis said.

"Population growth and climate change are instances of unchecked exponential growth," the study states. "Each places strains upon our available resources, each is a recognized problem that we would like to control, but attempts to do so at this comparatively late stage in their development have not been encouraging."

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Cosmic conservation: Why experts argue portions of the solar ... - Salon

Believe it or not, there are many people who are planning what our arrival on Mars will be like. From the organization of society, to the laws and waste management. There is nothing random: it will be our first space colonization after the Moon.

The nonprofit Mars Society is poised to take a giant step forward in its mission to support exploration and colonization of the Red Planet with the creation of a Mars Technology Institute to develop the tools and processes colonists will need.

Robert Zubrin, fundador y presidente de la Sociedad Marciana, esboz ayer el plan que tienen en mente durante el podcast Red Planet Live que te dejamos a continuacin para que puedas escucharlo por ti mismo.

Many of the details of the plan have yet to be finalized, such as funding sources, the exact structure of the organization and the location of the institute. But rumor has it that Seattle could be the city of choice.

As for the Mars Institute of Technology, it will complement the efforts of NASA and other space agencies, and will follow SpaceX founder Elon Musks vision of making humanity a multi-planetary species.

SpaceX and other enterprising launch companies are already moving quickly to develop the transportation systems that can get us to the planet Mars, Zubrin said in a press release. What is needed is an institution dedicated to developing the technologies that will allow us to live once there.

The institute would be structured as a non-profit organization, funded by tax-deductible contributions. A taxable corporation called Mars Technology Lab would also be created, which would be the sole property of the institute.

Esta estructura est diseada para ofrecer oportunidades de inversin a los inversores y generar ingresos a travs de licencias de propiedad intelectual, empresas derivadas y contratos de investigacin y desarrollo.

The plan foresees that the institute does research on its own central campus, and that it also subcontracts research work to companies and universities, as well as to volunteers who propose relevant projects.

Zubrin said he would like to launch the Mars Institute of Technology one way or another for the first of the year, that is, by 2024.

https://www.Youtube.com/watch?v=svRQGHrYjVMu0026amp;ab_channel=LunarSail

NASAs current schedule for deep space exploration calls for sending astronauts to the Moon for a series of missions starting in the middle of this decade, and applying the lessons learned during those lunar missions to trips to Mars from the 2030s.

Musk and SpaceX aim to transport colonists to Mars in a shorter time frame, using SpaceXs Starship superrocket.

The Mars Society already operates research stations in Utah and the Canadian Arctic, both focused on testing the technologies and processes that could come into play during actual missions to Mars.

Can the Mars Society make its dream of creating a technological institute come true? Zubrin acknowledges that the business case for investing in the Mars Institute of Technology might not be as obvious as it would be for, say, a launch startup.

Initial funders will need to be motivated by a long-term vision rather than short-term profit, states in todays press release. It is hope, rather than greed, that will take us to Mars.

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We havent even set foot on Mars and we are already setting up a ... - Softonic EN

Perseverance Rover

NASA's oxygen-generating experiment that accompanied the Perseverance rover has successfully completed its mission on Mars and may enable future astronauts landing on the Red Planet to produce oxygen for fuel and breathing, the agency has announced.

Developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a microwave-oven-sized device called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilisation Experiment), has generated oxygen for the 16th and final time aboard the Perseverance rover.

"MOXIE's impressive performance demonstrates the feasibility of extracting oxygen from Mars' atmospherea potential resource for supplying breathable air or rocket propellant to future astronauts," said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy in a statement.

"Developing technologies that allow us to utilise resources on the Moon and Mars is critical for building a long-term lunar presence, creating a robust lunar economy, and supporting an initial human exploration campaign to Mars," added Melroy.

MOXIE served as the first-ever demonstration of technology that humans could use to survive on and leave the Red Planet.

It produces molecular oxygen through an electrochemical process that separates one oxygen atom from each molecule of carbon dioxide drawn from Mars' thin atmosphere.

As these gases flow through the system, they are analyzed to verify the purity and quantity of the oxygen produced.

Since Perseverance landed on Mars in 2021, MOXIE has generated a total of 122 grams of oxygen, equivalent to what a small dog breathes in 10 hours.

At its most efficient, MOXIE was able to produce 12 grams of oxygen per hour, twice as much as NASA's original goals for the instrument, and at a purity level of 98 per cent or higher.

On its 16th run, which occurred on August 7, the instrument produced 9.8 grams of oxygen.

An oxygen-producing system could benefit future missions in various ways, with the most significant being as a source of rocket propellant, which would be required in substantial quantities to launch rockets carrying astronauts for their return trip home.

Rather than transporting large quantities of oxygen to Mars, future astronauts could rely on materials they find on the planet's surface to survive.

The next step would involve creating a full-scale system that includes an oxygen generator like MOXIE and a way to liquefy and store the produced oxygen.

The successful completion of MOXIE's mission marks a significant milestone in NASA's efforts to explore and eventually send humans to Mars. It opens up the possibility of producing essential resources on-site, reducing the need for Earth-based resupply missions, and advancing the prospect of human colonization of the Red Planet.

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The above article has been published from a wire source with minimal modifications to the headline and text.

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NASA's MOXIE Experiment Triumphs in Generating Oxygen ... - The Weather Channel

India recently launched a rocket to the moon. Russia gave it a shot and wished they had not. Exploration rovers have crept across the surface of Mars, and Elon Musk is plotting how to get some of us there to join them. Scientists, as well as science fiction writers, tend to focus on the stars. Yet the oceans of our world offer equally interesting material. As a visiting scientist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, each day on the way to my office I passed a room with jars of what looked like 6-foot-long earthworms. They were actually from one of the strangest ecosystems known on Earth: a habitat more than a mile beneath the ocean's surface, a hydrothermal vent community.

A hydrothermal vent is an area where a major fissure on the seabed occurs between plates making up the Earth's crust. As the plates gradually separate, underlying volcanic activity reaches the ocean. As the molten volcanic rock encounters ultracold seawater, the physical and chemical reactions are impressive. Even more remarkable is that these vents are the habitat of deep-sea animals. Among the notable sea creatures are enormous, bright red tube worms. Some are as thick as a child's arm and twice as long. The tube worms stretch up from the ocean floor in clusters, waving like the tendrils of a huge organism from a science fiction movie.

On the Earths surface, natural habitats are being eliminated and many species face extinction under the assault of modern technology. Ironically, without that technology, the mysterious thermal vent communities would not have been revealed. They were discovered less than half a century ago during deep-sea exploration using submersibles that can withstand the tremendous pressure of tons of ocean water.

Natural communities on Earth ultimately receive their energy from the sun. Even animals that live in caves depend on organic materials from sunlit regions. The debris they rely on for food had its origin in green plants. But in hydrothermal vent habitats, the base of the food chain is formed by bacteria, which acquire their energy from chemical sources in the seepage area itself. In sharp distinction to virtually all other life we know about, these underworld communities function without dependency on sunlight. Although submersibles have extendible devices for picking up items, many of the vent animals are mobile, and some have never been captured. Countless species remain undescribed or yet-to-be-discovered in the worlds oceans.

Since a vent may remain active for a few decades at most, one puzzle for ecologists is how the species inhabiting the vent communities manage to persist. Where does a giant clam or tube worm that depends on nutrients in a small area of deep ocean go when the energy source disappears? Except for the fishes, most of the organisms move slowly, at best. Presumably each species has a reproductive strategy in which larvae disperse into the outer blackness beyond the vent. Most probably die in the ocean depths, but some eventually reach other vent habitats. Just as any given vent eventually ceases to exist, new ones are constantly being formed, setting the stage for colonization. The lifestyle is a precarious one, but it works, as evidenced by the similarity of species composition from deep-sea thermal vent communities around the world.

In the mid-20th century the idea of communities of numerous, sometimes large, animals living around deep-sea hydrothermal vents sounded like a creature from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. In fact, in the 1970s the first reports of vent communities seemed too fantastic to be believed. Paradoxically, although these ecosystems appear to be among the most fragile and sensitive in the world, they would rank at the top of ones least likely to be destroyed by humans. Simply studying them is difficult enough. These bizarre habitats also make the important point that to explore the mysteries of the universe, we need not look only to outer space. Plenty of opportunities for discovery await us right here on our own planet.

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ECOVIEWS: Thermal vents produce bizarre life forms | Features ... - Charleston Post Courier

SpaceX chief Elon Musk has finally announced that the Starship rocket is ready for launch. This is after a series of recent engine tests. However, before the highly anticipated launch can take place, SpaceX must obtain clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

According to a report, it is the most powerful rocket ever made. In April this year, the Super Heavy rocket had its maiden flight testing but encountered a technical issue during the test mission that led to a controlled explosion, prematurely ending the flight.

The immense force generated by the Super Heavys 33 Raptor engines caused the launchpad to disintegrate, resulting in debris being scattered beyond the launch site. However, it seems the technical issues have been resolved following Elon Musks announcement.

The report further explained that SpaceX engineers have developed and tested a water-cooled flame deflector to address the issues encountered during the initial flight, This innovative system, constructed from steel, is specifically designed to withstand the intense heat and force generated by the rocket as it leaves the launchpad.

By implementing this water-deluge system, the rocket company aims to mitigate the risks associated with future launches. However, clearance from the FAA is required before the second test flight can proceed. The FAA is currently conducting an assessment to evaluate the impact of the first flight on the surrounding area.

Meanwhile, environmental groups have expressed concerns, asserting that the FAA failed to adequately assess the environmental damage caused by SpaceXs rocket prior to the first flight.

Read Also: SpaceX ready to launch Starship, the strongest rocket ever built into space

Once fully tested and operational, the rocket company plans to utilize the Super Heavy for crewed missions to celestial bodies such as the moon, Mars, and potentially even destinations further into space.

In fact, it has already secured a contract with NASA to employ a modified version of the upper stage, known as the Starship spacecraft, for the Artemis III crewed landing on the moon. The targeted timeframe for this momentous lunar landing is set for 2025.

According to a statement, NASA said,

NASA has awarded a contract modification to SpaceX to further develop its Starship human landing system to meet agency requirements for long-term human exploration of the Moon under Artemis.

As a result, the success of the next test flight is crucial, as any further failures could jeopardize NASAs tight schedule for its first crewed lunar landing in the coming years.

SpaceX, short for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., was founded by Elon Musk in 2002. The companys primary goal is to revolutionize space technology and make space exploration more accessible and affordable.

According to Elon Musk, the vision is to enable the colonization of Mars and make humanity a multi-planetary species. Musks long-term goal is to establish a self-sustaining civilization on Mars to ensure the survival of humanity in the event of catastrophic events on Earth.

In 2012, the rocket company became the first privately funded company to deliver cargo to the ISS with its Dragon spacecraft. Three years later, in 2015, the rocket company successfully landed the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket vertically, marking the first-ever landing of an orbital-class rocket.

In 2018, the Falcon Heavy, a heavy-lift launch vehicle, made its debut and successfully launched a Tesla Roadster into space on its maiden flight. In 2020, SpaceXs Crew Dragon became the first crewed spacecraft to launch from American soil since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011, sending NASA astronauts to the ISS.

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Elon Musk's 'most powerful rocket ever made' is finally ready for launch - Technext

A recent preprint paper examines the minimum number of people required to maintain a feasible settlement on Mars while accounting for psychological and behavioral factors, specifically in emergency situations. This study was conducted by a team of data scientists from George Mason University and holds the potential to help researchers better understand the appropriate conditions for a successful long-term Mars settlement, specifically pertaining to how those settlers will get along during all situations. But why is it important to better understand the psychological factors pertaining for a potential future Mars colony?

We cannot think of any type of habitat or future human settlement without including human behavior, psychological or social, Dr. Anamaria Berea, who is an associate professor in the Computational & Data Sciences Department at George Mason University and a co-author on the study, tells Universe Today. We humans are not robots, and even the best trained astronauts have different personalities and modes of interaction with each other and with their extreme environment. But on the long run and for long duration missions, team behavior is a crucial factor for the success or failure of a mission.

For the study, the researchers used an Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) method to gauge interactions of future Mars colonists, known as agents in the study, and who exhibit a variety of personality types and skill levels that they will use for operating a Mars colony mining for minerals. The four personality types include Agreeables, Socials, Reactives, and Neurotics, where aggressiveness and competitiveness are ranked from lowest to highest, respectively. In addition, each agents skill level is associated with management or engineering that they will use to contribute to the colonys mining needs.

A psychologically diverse population is more desirable, Dr. Berea tells Universe Today. In our paper, the neurotics are actually needed for high-risk tasks; therefore, they are more likely to solve the problems in case of accidents, but also risk their lives. In the simulation, we start with equal percentages of psychological diversity, and then we see who survives in the system and who does not.

The ABM focused on how each personality type coped with both their increasing time on Mars and emergency situations, such as resupply shuttle accidents and habitat disasters, noting the colony would be largely self-sustaining with two-year resupply missions from Earth. The researchers noted their goal with this study was to address fundamental questions pertaining to the conditions necessary to maintain a feasible Mars colony, the personality type combinations that would perform the best in a Mars colony, and the required number of resources necessary to maintain the Mars colony given the two-year gap between resupply missions from Earth. Additionally, these came with the assumption of periodic accidents either with the resupply missions or within the colony itself.

Additional ABM parameters also included how the agents coped with the local mining economy and harsh Martian environment, specifically regarding the solar radiation bombarding the Martian surface; how the Martian economy could operate outside of the colony; and using energy sources in space, specifically the potential for solar power and nuclear fission. The researchers referenced the International Space Station and outposts in Antarctica as a baseline for their study.

Using the ABM, the researchers ran five simulations with each comprising 28 Earth years and population sizes ranging from 10 to 50 agents, with increases of 10 agents in each simulation. In the end, they determined that a minimum colony population of 22 agents was ideal to maintain a feasible Mars mining colony over the long-term. Additionally, the researchers found that the Agreeable personality type not only performed the best but was the only personality type to survive the full term for all ABM simulations. However, the researchers were quick to note future work is needed to better understand the assumptions described in this paper.

As noted, the simulated Mars colony for this study was largely self-sustaining, though not fully self-sustaining, as the colony relies on resupplies from Earth every two years to ensure both its short-term and long-term survival. While this study found a minimum colony population of 22 agents was ideal given the parameters, could there be a minimum population size needed for the colony to be fully self-sustaining, meaning no engagements with Earth or other off-Earth settlements (i.e., Earths Moon)?

I dont think something like this can exist, Dr. Berea tells Universe Today. We know historically that isolated cities or villages or even countries cannot thrive. In the extreme environments habitats designed on Earth from scratch, such as under the sea or in Antarctica, there are periodic replenishments of people or supplies. Nobody lives there isolated forever. Thats why in our model we assume that there are some interactions with Earth, even if sparse sometimes. The scenario where we send a number of people on Mars on a one-way trip and never hear from them or interact with them again, seems very implausible to me. If we successfully send people there once, I am pretty sure we will be able to send supply shuttles many times. Its also more cost-efficient.

A prime example of an alleged one-way trip to Mars was with the private Dutch company, Mars One, which proposed sending people to Mars for good in hopes of establishing a permanent human settlement on the Red Planet. This was met with both enthusiasm and harsh criticism, specifically pertaining to Mars One not being an aerospace company or building their own hardware. Though applications for eager Mars-bound travelers went through several rounds, Mars One eventually declared bankruptcy in 2019 having never launched a single mission.

This recent study builds on several previous studies that attempted to estimate the minimum number of people required to maintain a Mars colony, with a 2001 paper, a 2003 paper, and a 2020 paper each estimating a minimum of 500, 100, and 110 people, respectively. But if this most recent study proves accurately that a future Mars colony will only need a minimum of 22 people to maintain it, how soon after we start sending humans to Mars will a potential colony reach this minimum number of 22?

I believe the first time humans will set foot on Mars will not be for any kind of permanent settlement or colonization, but for exploration and for laying the ground for future missions, Dr. Berea tells Universe Today. We dont yet know when that will happen, it is still years in the future, and after that there will be more years before actually considering sending humans for permanent or semi-permanent settlements. So, I dont think this will happen in the near future yet.

When will we go to Mars and what will be the minimum population required to maintain a feasible colony there? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

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What's the Bare Minimum Number of People for a Mars Habitat? - Universe Today

The Indian government is replacing the nation's usual name with an older Sanskrit term in official media, prompting questions about plans to make an official change.

In a dinner invitation sent to G20 summit attendees, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was referred to as "Prime Minister of Bharat" signaling an unprecedented eagerness to leave behind the term "India."

"India" and "Bharat" are considered interchangable terms within the country but both domestically and internationally, "India" is the much more widely used name for the nation.

INDIA'S LUNAR ROVER COMPLETES WALK ON MOON'S SURFACE IN LESS THAN 2 WEEKS AFTER HISTORIC LAUNCH

The use of "Bharat" on official, international invitations signals that Modi's Hindu nationalist movement is seeking to leave the term "India" behind an aesthetic decision many of his supporters see as important for de-colonization.

"Another blow to slavery mentality," Chief Minister of Uttarakhand Pushkar Singh Dhami wrote on social media Tuesday. The regional official called the use of "Bharat" on the invitation a "proud moment for every countryman."

"Long live Mother Bharat!" he added.

INDIAN PRIME MINISTER MODI ADDRESSES BORDER CONCERNS WITH CHINESE PRESIDENT JINPING AT BRICS SUMMIT

Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor questioned the nationalists' intentions, urging India to retain both monikers.

"While there is no constitutional objection to calling India Bharat, which is one of the countrys two official names, I hope the government will not be so foolish as to completely dispense with 'India,' which has incalculable brand value built up over centuries," Tharoor wrote.

He added, "We should continue to use both words rather than relinquish our claim to a name redolent of history, a name that is recognised around the world."

The etymology of "India" is complicated and developed over thousands of years.

Ancient Greeks called the region "Indos" thought to be transliterated from the term "Hindi" and other cultures began linguistically identifying the area with the Indus River.

Article 1 of the Indian Constitution begins, "India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States."

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India may be moving to change its name to ancient Sanskrit term ... - FOX Bangor/ABC 7 News and Stories

By Alicia Inez Guzmn

Editors Note:With little fanfare, the United States is moving to modernize its stockpile of nuclear weapons. A massive part of that project will happen at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Its a project that promises to bring at least $15 billion into New Mexico and presages enormous, inevitable changes for our state.

Its with this in mind that Searchlight New Mexico launches a new area of coverage devoted to nuclear issues. The following essay by Alicia Inez Guzmn, the reporter responsible for this coverage, sets out to describe her personal and family history with the Lab. Her essay also serves as an act of disclosure. None of us has the luxury of disinterest when it comes to nuclear proliferation but it can be argued that Alicia has a more personal connection than most journalists. Her capacity for fairness in covering this all-important story is without doubt.

My parents house sits at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos facing west toward the setting sun and the Jemez Mountains. I still remember nights looking out across the vast darkness at the twinkling lights of Los Alamos, the secret city, a place, as the late anti-nuclear activist and Ohkay Owingeh elder Herman Agoyo put it, with no public memory.

As the crow flies, Truchas is 30 miles from Los Alamos, separated by the great Tewa Basin and arid badlands checkerboarded by Hispano settlements and Indigenous Pueblos. For most of my young life, I took the Lab for granted. It was there in the background, omnipresent like a low-frequency hum.

Memorandum for the record

But it didnt alwaysjust exist.It was forced onto our homeland and into our consciousness, even if most origin stories about the Manhattan Project and the Labs continued presence in the region treat local people like extras in a movie.

For the several hundred workers required to man these plants, there must also be several thousand service and supporting personnel, a 1950 internal report read. Its writer was debating whether Los Alamos was the best place for the weapons Lab moving forward.

Scientists performed clandestine work here, yes, but that work required and continues to require the effort of so many others supporting personnel who can also be on the frontlines of exposure.

I am reminded, for instance, of an experiment that went horribly wrong just nine months after American forces decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs. A Canadian physicist, Louis Slotin, was trying to gather data on nuclear chain reactions when the screwdriver he was holding as a wedge between a beryllium tamper and a plutonium core accidentally slipped. For a brief second, the beryllium and plutonium reached fission, sending out a blast of blue light and radioactivity.

Slotins death in 1946 has been famously recorded in histories of the Lab. But there were several other people in the room that day, including several colleagues and a security guard whose fate has largely been eclipsed. All that was noted in records of the event was his fear. Apparently, it was said, the security guard ran out of the room and up a hill. And thats where his part in the story ends.

But he was there, a witness and one, I imagine, who was exposed to the same plutonium that within a matter of nine days killed Slotin. Ive long wondered:Who was he?What was his story?

When I think of that man, I think of my Grandpa Gilbert. Many auxiliary staff were local people who got their start on the hill as security guards for the Atomic Energy Commission. That was his story a career begun as a security guard in 1946 and ended some three decades later as a staff member of the Lab and the University of California, which managed it. The position was a distinction that not many Hispanos held at the time. My mom says he felt dignified by his work there the only means he had to raise five kids after World War II. But there was a trade-off, including discreet trips to the doctor where he was screened for cancer on a more-than-routine basis.

Many family members would follow in his footsteps my Uncle Jerry among them. Los Alamos was a place abounding in conspiracy theories and Uncle Jerry found himself at the center of one of them. He believed that racism had created a culture of retaliation, so toxic that it led to his being framed for intentionally dosing his supervisor with plutonium-239. After my uncles death two years ago, theSanta Fe New Mexican published a column narrating the sordid events his boss ultimately recanted the allegations and my uncle and others won a settlement but he was haunted by a lasting specter. The multiple cancers that consumed his body decades later were products of the Lab, in his opinion, like sleeper fires set within him.

I only recently came to know the fragments of my Uncle Pats story. During his three years at the Lab in the late 1970s, he was flown on two occasions to California with a locked box chained to his wrist. His destination was TRW, the predecessor of Northrop Grumman Space Technology, and his cargo, he told me, was top-secret technology that could detect nuclear weapons testing from outer space.

Theres a kind of mental acrobatics required to compartmentalize these different realities the opportunity and the harm, the secrets and the consent. I know this compartmentalization well, this desire to draw a line in the sand between the good and the bad. When I was 19, I spent a summer working as an undergraduate intern in the Labs explosives division, a building perched behind a maze of fences and guards. I didnt have a security clearance at the time, nor could I foresee getting one, so I spent most days marooned at my desk in the front office, filing papers and sending emails. I couldnt even take a bathroom break without a chaperone accompanying me.

Nothing of that work rings more clearly than a memory of two scientists stumbling out into the hallway, covered in blood. An experiment had gone awry nothing radiation related but it was so shrouded in mystery that parsing what actually happened is like trying to put a puzzle together thats missing half the pieces. I watched in horror from the doorframe.

After that, I transferred to the Bradbury Science Museum, also in Los Alamos, where I walked by replicas of Little Boy and Fat Man daily to get to my desk. I spent that summer, among other things, writing exhibition text about the Manhattan Projects early architects J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman. I wrote not the history ofmi gente, but of those agents of immense creation and destruction, those whod exacted whatMyrriah Gmezin her book, Nuclear Nuevo Mxico, calls nuclear colonization. The irony.

Now, as I write about the role of nuclear weapons across New Mexico, the nation and the globe, Toni Morrisons words come to mind: The subject of the dream is the dreamer. Her ideas about literature were deeply influenced by psychoanalysis. Indeed, to her mind, the act of dreaming was not unlike the act of writing. Or, to put it another way, the subject of the writing is the writer. Here, that is me.

My family and communitys own tangled history with the Lab sits in my subconscious like an inchoate thought. Only when I hold it up to scrutiny does that thought form into the imperative, allowing me to fully fathom what the Manhattan Project birthed in our backyard. Perhaps this is what Gmez refers to as an innate knowing, our local sixth sense.

The locals know their local land and water supplies are contaminated from the nuclear material that was either buried in nearby canyons or on riverbanks, Gmez writes in her book. They know their presence on the Pajarito Plateau is being erased from national memory. They know they were placed in dangerous jobs because of their identities. They know the plutonium exploded into the atmosphere during the Trinity Test is making them sick. They know nuclear waste, if buried in their backyard, poses severe threats.

Iknowall of this when I drive along Highway 84/285, an artery that connects Pojoaque Pueblo to Espaola and the Pueblos of Santa Clara and Ohkay Owingeh, below a billboard sprawled against sienna-hued bluffs. A woman with a complexion like my own holds radiation detection equipment and smiles down at me.

Radiation Control Technicians are vital to operations at LANL, the billboard proclaims. Start your career as an RCT at Northern NM College now.

My worldview will always shape my writing on a topic that hits so close to home, but the focus of this series The Atomic Hereafter is to highlight all the communities most impacted by 80 years of nuclear presence, from the most recent attempts to modernize the nations nuclear arsenal to the long, drawn-out ways radiation can transmit from mother to child. Nuclear issues in this state are generational. I will take them one story at a time.

This article was previosly published on Searchlight New Mexico. Searchlight New Mexico is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that seeks to empower New Mexicans to demand honest and effective public policy.

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My Nuclear Family - The Good Men Project