NASA and one private company respond to Navaho nation’s demand to cancel lunar mission
Both NASA and one of the private companies involved in ULA’s first Vulcan rocket launch on January 8, 2023 that will carry the Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander to the Moon have now responded to the Navaho nation, which has stated its religion gives it the unlimited right to decide what can go there.
Navaho President Buu Nygren had claimed earlier this week that the “Moon is sacred to numerous Indigenous cultures” and the payloads of human ashes being sent to the Moon was “tantamount to desecration.” He demanded the mission be delayed or canceled.
Let’s start with NASA’s response, which essentially tossed the hot potato to the private sector.
In a pre-launch science briefing on Thursday (Jan. 4), NASA representatives addressed the controversy over the payloads containing human remains being included on the mission, noting that the mission is a private, commercial effort and that NASA has merely contracted for its scientific payloads to be transported to the moon. “We don’t have the framework for telling them what they can and can’t fly,” said Chris Culbert, Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “The approval process doesn’t run through NASA for commercial missions.”
Culbert added that the private companies launching payloads as a part of the CLPS program “don’t have to clear those payloads” before launch. “So these are truly commercial missions, and it’s up to them to sell what they sell,” Culbert said.
A second NASA official tried to make nice, suggesting that these early missions will help the government and the private sector figure out how to deal with these absurd objections, hinting at the possibility of future government regulation.
The head of the company Celestis, which is one of two companies with payloads of human ashes on Peregrine, was more blunt.
“The regulatory process that approves space missions does not consider compliance with the tenets of any religion in the process for obvious reasons. No individual religion can or should dictate whether a space mission should be approved,” Celestis CEO and co-founder Charles Chafer said in an emailed statement to Space.com.
“No one, and no religion, owns the moon, and, were the beliefs of the world’s multitude of religions considered, it’s quite likely that no missions would ever be approved,” Chafer added. “Simply, we do not and never have let religious beliefs dictate humanity’s space efforts — there is not and should not be a religious test.”
Kudos to Chafer for fearlessly telling the Navahoes where to go. We need more such statements from others, if only to stiffen the spines of feckless government officials, so that they don’t end up bowing weakly to future demands as idiotic. Without doubt the poisonous infusion of critical race theory in all of public education will encourage others in the so-called “oppressed” races to make similar demands in the coming years.
Note that this article clarifies the payloads of human remains on this launch. Two companies, Celestis and Elysium, have human ashes that will fly on the upper stage of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, ending up in solar orbit. Celestis has a second payload on Peregrine, which if the landing is successful or crashes, will end up on the Moon.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Both NASA and one of the private companies involved in ULA’s first Vulcan rocket launch on January 8, 2023 that will carry the Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander to the Moon have now responded to the Navaho nation, which has stated its religion gives it the unlimited right to decide what can go there.
Navaho President Buu Nygren had claimed earlier this week that the “Moon is sacred to numerous Indigenous cultures” and the payloads of human ashes being sent to the Moon was “tantamount to desecration.” He demanded the mission be delayed or canceled.
Let’s start with NASA’s response, which essentially tossed the hot potato to the private sector.
In a pre-launch science briefing on Thursday (Jan. 4), NASA representatives addressed the controversy over the payloads containing human remains being included on the mission, noting that the mission is a private, commercial effort and that NASA has merely contracted for its scientific payloads to be transported to the moon. “We don’t have the framework for telling them what they can and can’t fly,” said Chris Culbert, Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “The approval process doesn’t run through NASA for commercial missions.”
Culbert added that the private companies launching payloads as a part of the CLPS program “don’t have to clear those payloads” before launch. “So these are truly commercial missions, and it’s up to them to sell what they sell,” Culbert said.
A second NASA official tried to make nice, suggesting that these early missions will help the government and the private sector figure out how to deal with these absurd objections, hinting at the possibility of future government regulation.
The head of the company Celestis, which is one of two companies with payloads of human ashes on Peregrine, was more blunt.
“The regulatory process that approves space missions does not consider compliance with the tenets of any religion in the process for obvious reasons. No individual religion can or should dictate whether a space mission should be approved,” Celestis CEO and co-founder Charles Chafer said in an emailed statement to Space.com.
“No one, and no religion, owns the moon, and, were the beliefs of the world’s multitude of religions considered, it’s quite likely that no missions would ever be approved,” Chafer added. “Simply, we do not and never have let religious beliefs dictate humanity’s space efforts — there is not and should not be a religious test.”
Kudos to Chafer for fearlessly telling the Navahoes where to go. We need more such statements from others, if only to stiffen the spines of feckless government officials, so that they don’t end up bowing weakly to future demands as idiotic. Without doubt the poisonous infusion of critical race theory in all of public education will encourage others in the so-called “oppressed” races to make similar demands in the coming years.
Note that this article clarifies the payloads of human remains on this launch. Two companies, Celestis and Elysium, have human ashes that will fly on the upper stage of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, ending up in solar orbit. Celestis has a second payload on Peregrine, which if the landing is successful or crashes, will end up on the Moon.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Some coverage of this story mentions that human ashes have already been deposited onto the lunar surface, on 1999 July 31, onboard NASA’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft as it was purposely deorbited after a successful 18-month mission.
Eugene Shoemaker Is Still the Only Man Buried on the Moon
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/eugene-shoemaker-buried-moon-celestis-nasa
The Navajo Nation also complained about this one.
Rex W Ridenoure: I’ve noted this fact about Shoemaker on Batchelor, but in truth, it is irrelevant. The bottom line is the hubris of the Navahoes to think their religion rules all. It doesn’t, and certainly should not be allowed any consideration at all in this matter.
How about Mars?
Mars is Holy to Gustav Holst.
It is important to establish a precedent that this will not stand.
Is it already April fools
Just like with the idiotic 14th amendment argument to keep Trump off the ballot, if you put this before enough leftist judges, one of them is going to rule for the Navajos. NASA will probably cave but I hope the Celestis CEO has the backbone to tell the judge to pound sand.
You lost the war. Get over it.
Edward_2: “Mars is Holy to Gustav Holst.”
Mars will bring War.
It is odd but I thought the government issues launch licenses based on payloads.
https://www.faa.gov/space/licenses/payload_reviews
It covers payload related “foreign policy interests and international obligations of the US”.
American tribes are considered sovereign nations, thus the US must treat them as such.
Also, the US is a signatory to the UN “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” which has Article 18 about religious rights (“…to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”)
Watch for the lawfare….
What happens, as inevitably will occur as humans return to the moon, when someone dies there? Is that also a desecration? And what of eventual human settlements there? Will lunar cemeteries be forbidden and all human remains shipped back to earth? (Thus ‘disturbing,’ from the Navaho perspective, the remains of the dead.)
With more than a little empathy for the Navaho people, their objection strikes me as fundamentally illogical, although perhaps not within their own religious and cultural context. It seems, instead, like what they are really objecting to is any kind of human presence on the moon at all as a violation of its ‘sacred’ nature. That said, I wish someone from the Navaho culture would come forward and explain their objections at greater depth. With Western / Judeo-Christian culture itself under constant assault — and with the worst of motives ascribed to its adherents — I am willing to listen respectfully to them even if we should ultimately disagree. The free exchange of ideas and all of that.
Here is another link that covers this controversy:
https://www.aol.com/profound-desecration-navajo-nation-asks-183048782.html
On a more positive note, you can tell that something, the Second Space Age included, is ‘real’ when it begins to bump into the everyday life and beliefs of people and engenders controversies such as this. Robert, in his book Conscious Choice, lays out his analysis of the origins of slavery in the South — and the takeaways from this tragic blunder — in the context of what beliefs and values ought to obtain in this new frontier. What kind of culture(s) and folkways will lunar settlements have?
Call it what it is; intentional pollution.
In the same spirit as Milt, with an open mind, there is a perspective coming out of the Navaho that we cannot relate to. Contrast with what happened to Galileo at his discovered truth, contrary to religious doctrine at the time (keeping it simple). Somewhere along the way The Church had to yield its dominion over The Truth that wasn’t true.
We are going to the moon and beyond. Sometimes religious perceptions need to have a reformation so we don’t get in a horrible strife at doing these things that should, in the end, cause no strife.
Otherwise this looks like a clumsy shakedown exercise like we’ve recently seen in Hawaii.
The complaint by Navaho President Buu Nygren is no more than posturing by a politician for consumption by his local voters.
This case is but the spearhead of this movement
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-rights-nature-overseas-australia-local.html
I thought Chief Seattle disputed anyone owning property…at any rate, the Fithp called and want reparations for all those Clovis points that made their mammoth brethren extinct… payable in peanuts.
Once mastodons have been cloned–they will expect the Navajo to go back to Asia.
I remember a woman wanted a ride shut down because her son—far too large for it–fell off. He never should have been allowed on it. Now the ride is no more. There is always that one that wants to ruin everything like they’re king of the world.
Now my guess is that this Navaho was put up to do this by the same outsiders who want to shut some Native American coal mines, keep their brethren from hunting…etc.
Take a look at http://www.navenergy.com
Frankly, they should help fund space solar power so that Native Americans can be the People of the Sun once again.
Solar power against this
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-inequality-essential-tackling-climate-crisis.html
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-ice-surface-temperatures.html
In other news
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-technology-archaeological-biblical.html
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-evolution-random-previously-thought.html
Keep shelling out the Benjamins until we smile. The problem will go away.
Are there any Navaho Code Talkers still with us? I would like to hear what these older gentlemen have to say on this issue.