The dastardly and nefarious planetary plans of the Planetary Society, noted front organization for the Space Nazi Brigades of the Military Industrial Complex™, have been outed by the heroic brave moonbats of Indymedia Chiapas:

Why the fraud?

What's so bad about a "solar sail" that quietly wings its way through the "billions and billions" of stars in Carl Sagan's cosmos that it requires this level of fanciful "travel to the stars in a human lifetime at 100,000 miles per hour" hype to overcome public resistance?

The problem is this: western society has a facility for euphemism. A mass, disorderly retreat by cowardly troops is a "strategic withdrawal of forces". Genocide is called "rural pacification". Legalized baby-killing is "choice". Whores are "commercial sex workers". A christian crusade against Islam is called a "war on terror". And so on.

The pleasantly named "solar sail" evokes a scene of mostly harmless gentle motion in an airless void. Actually the "solar sail" is the latest attempt to orbit a highly reflective "space mirror" with all that that implies. In fact, the solar "sail" is PRECISELY a very highly reflective space mirror.

The secret's out: solar sails are nothing more than cover for a super-duper double-top-secret orbiting space death ray mirror technology development and deployment scheme!

On the bright side, Bruce Gagnon and company should at least appreciate that it's not nuclear powered. Indeed, what could be more environmentally friendly than clean, renewable, solar-powered mass destruction? It's like getting all the apocalypse of a thermonuclear warhead, without all the pesky radioactive by-products and mutant roaches the size of shopping malls.

(Clearly the flap over space weaponization has crossed the line into self-parody.)

[via Jeff Foust]

UPDATE: Looks like the death-ray deployment failed.

Posted by T.L. James on June 21, 2005 09:43 PM