Story from KNAU Arizona Public Radio
Highlights presented without comment
Navajo Nation president asks NASA to delay Moon launch over possible human remains
Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren has asked NASA to delay a scheduled launch to the Moon that could include cremated remains.
Nygren says he recently learned of the Jan. 8 launch of the Vulcan Centaur carrying the Peregrine Mission One. The lander will carry some payloads from a company known to provide memorial services by shipping human cremated remains to the Moon.
Nygren wants the launch delayed and the tribe consulted immediately. He noted the Moon is sacred to numerous Indigenous cultures and that depositing human remains on it is “tantamount to desecration.”
https://www.knau.org/knau-and-arizona-news/2023-12-28/navajo-nation-president-asks-nasa-to-delay-moon-launch-over-possible-human-remains
“This memorandum reinforced the commitment to Executive Order 13175 of November 6, 2000,” President Nygren wrote. “Additionally, the Memorandum of Understanding Regarding Interagency Coordination and Collaboration for the Protection of Indigenous Sacred Sites, which you and several other members of the Administration signed in November 2021, further underscores the requirement for such consultation.”
He added this explicitly recognizes that sacred sites can consist of “places that afford views of important areas of land, water, or of the sky and celestial bodies.”
NASA has yet to respond.
https://www.knau.org/knau-and-arizona-news/2023-12-28/navajo-nation-president-asks-nasa-to-delay-moon-launch-over-possible-human-remains
Read the complete story at: https://www.knau.org/knau-and-arizona-news/2023-12-28/navajo-nation-president-asks-nasa-to-delay-moon-launch-over-possible-human-remains
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Don’t fall for it. Everything is sacred to someone and you’ll open a can of worms 🙂
That ship has sailed.
So has Eugene Shoemaker whose remains already sit…on the MOON
So pretty much anywhere they want to claim as sacred. Kinda like the deal Hunter Biden wanted…immunity from prosecution for all current AND ANY FUTURE charges
puts an end to wind turdines anywhere !!
Especially on the moon.
He added this explicitly recognizes that sacred sites can consist of “PLACES that afford views of important areas of land, water, or of the sky and celestial bodies.” ON THIS PLANET
A can of worms is probably sacred to someone.
Ah yes, the sacred can of worms.
Isn’t a can of worms considered food?
sacred food
Perhaps we can trade the can of worms for the moon.
Can of worms, and 12 beaded necklaces.
The astronauts left human waste on the moon – does that count?
I know a guy who knows a guy and can sell you a few grams of sacred lunar poop for a small fortune if you are interested.
The atmosphere is sacred to a lot of people right now too. And what about fire, that they’re using to power that rocket? And is the rocket passing in front of the sun? Are any of the controllers eating beef?
But if they aren’t ‘native’ people it doesn’t matter.
Fire is sacred to Zoroastrians and both Buddhists and traditionalists in Mongolia. These blasphemous blastoffs taking place without a proper blessing from an accredited prelate must cease forthwith.
I would give Native American religions as much consideration as Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists or Jews. That is, listen politely, and change nothing.
ridiculous adj
Deserving of ridicule.
Ridicule us
Or a salad without Radicchio
It’s Radicchio less
The Lahaina recovery is being hamstrung by needing to keep the sacred (and toxic) ashes of the town on the island while at the same time there are protests over creating a dump for the debris.
If the moon is sacred then everything is sacred, then nothing is sacred. IMO
story tip.
l think l may have come across something here.
lts only been 2 days and so is still early to be sure, but over that time l have been comparing the current temps from the local digital weather stations that are online with those from my manual thermometer.
During that time the digital weather stations temps have been running “warm” by anywhere between ( 0.5C to 1.5C ) compared to my thermometer. l have had my thermometer for over 40 years and its never given me a reason to doubt its accuracy.
Therefore can l ask anyone who has a digital weather station and who can also access use of a manual thermometer of known accuracy to do their own tests and see what results they get.
I’ve been doing that for nearly 20 years..
You have discovered just how fickle temperature is and why it is completely the wrong metric for measuring Climate.
Look around your neighbourhood (easily 3 miles radius) for ‘heat s sources’ like large air conditioning systems but esp Cold Stores and Food Warehouses.
Even just large warehouses & distribution centres or commercial glasshouse
If you wanna drive yourself complete nuts, get a threesome of something like the Elitech EL51 dataloggers
Here’s a nice one purpose made the job:
https://elitech.uk.com/collections/temperature-data-logger/products/rc-51h
About UK£25 ea. Batteries last forever and they’ll record from 1 minute intervals up to what you like to 0.1Celsius accuracy
Make yourself a pair of ‘Stevenson screens’ using 4″ plastic duct and put a logger in each.
Hang one among some trees and the other as close as possible but ‘in the open’
Confect a watertight container for the other and put it under 12″ of soil/garden/dirt as close the other two as possible
Enjoy the perfect insanity that is: Climate Science
PS You will especially relish comparing the output from the ‘tree’ one to the ‘open air’ one
You may even come away believing in Gaia but most esp will learn the incalculable, but utterly ignored by everyone else, importance of water
I have the Davis Instruments 6250 Vantage Vue weather station mounted about 10 feet above my garden. The garden is quite isolated in that it is around 100 feet from any man made structure or surface. The main reason I got it was to provide much more accurate rainfall amounts than what the local weather stations reported.
Had it for 3+ years now and the discrepancies between the local news and what I record are quite startling. The 6250 records various data like temperature, wind, rainfall, etc and keeps a record for 1 year.
There cetainly does seem to be discrepanies with digital weather stations.
But what’s got my interest here is that all the digital weather stations have been running warm compared to my old style manual thermometer.
So my thinking here is that has the switch from recording temps with manual thermometers to digital thermometers over the recent years. Has that played any part in the recent warming trend that’s been happening.
The results sofar l have seen from my thermometer suggests it may.
Or, cynically, they may have been calibrated that way…
Where I lived for some long time (Sacramento, CA) I often compared two thermometers out of curiosity once I noticed their difference.. Their precision was 1 degree F, accuracy unknown. No doubt neither the thermometers not their sitting were reasonable for “climate: studies but they were useful for my purposes. One was outside an east facing window, under the roof overhand, where I could easily read it from inside. The other is built somewhere into the car, to record outside temperatures. This is about warm weather temperatures, from around early May until near the end of October.
Around mid afternoon the sun was far enough towards the west that the house produced enough shade to largely or completely cover the car in the east side driveway. Up until sundown, or a bit after, the car thermometer read 10 F lower than the thermometer under the roof overhang. The two thermometers were about 3 paces apart.
1 to 1/12 hours after full dark, the two thermometers read the same temperature.
You can’t really do a valid verification or calibration of thermometers without both being in the same place and measuring the same thing like a water bath or air in a controlled space. You also need a reference device with a tracible calibration. That said, a glass thermometer has a much slower response time than an electronic sensor to a changing temperature – typically minutes vs seconds. That means when it’s cooling down in late afternoon the glass thermometer will tend to read higher than and electronic one and vice versa when it’s warming up. These effects will tend to diminish when temperatures are averaged over time, but not so much when a daily average is taken as the average of just the min and max for the day. When significant weather systems roll through it is not uncommon to see temperatures change by 10 -20 F in a half hour or less. This could easily induce an apparent difference of several degrees between slow and fast response instruments.
Yes the different ways that glass and digital record temps is what matters here.
Digital will pick up short term highs in temp that a glass thermometer will not.
lts interesting that record highs are often record at airports where the quick response time of digital make more prone to be affected by the warming due of passing jet engines.
But what’s really got my interest is that the digital weather stations always look to be recording higher temps then my glass thermometer. Weather the digital weather station is placed in a town or rural area. That seems strange to me.
Currently the weather across the North Linc’s area is much the same (cloudy with rain). But where my thermometer is recording a temp of 7.5C the digital weather stations are recording tempsbetween 8.3C to 9.9C while 2 of these weather stations are placed in city’s and the other 2 are placed in rural area’s.
lts this that’s makes me think that the different ways they record temps maybe affecting the reading they make.
You bring up many valid points, taxed.
The problem that I have always had with the manual thermometers is that you have to read them straight on to get a somewhat accurate reading. Another is that the graduations (those little lines) are pretty much a guess. I don’t think I have ever seen a commercially produced manual thermometer that had graduations in tenths of a degree. As mentioned here on WUWT numerous times, placement of a thermometer is crucial to better readings. Overall, commercially produced manual thermometers from almost date (age), are notoriously inaccurate. You may have the exception.
I am in a very rural area of northern Florida on the outskirts of a town of less than 1,000 people. I’m retired now and early in my extremely varied working career, did instrumentation in a steel mill in California. There were no manual thermometers used on the production lines, though many of the operators had them placed near their stations as a joke as it was always HOT inside the 52 acre building. Everything was computer controlled on the production lines.
The official temperature for the town is recorded at the local high school where their weather station is attached to the concrete building about 20 feet above the concrete sidewalk next to the black asphalt drive & parking area on the south side. On sunny days, the temperature differences between their readings and my own can exceed 10 degrees. Right now, I am reading 35.6° F and the high school is reading 40° F. The high school is about 2 miles from where I live.
The thermometer l have is a room thermometer from the mid 1980’s that was made in what was then West Germany so it should be of a high standard.
The model is called “Thermo Comfort De-Lux disign” and looks to be one of their top of the range models. lt has a range from -13C to 63C across a 8 inch long scale
This large scale allows the space between the 1C marker lines to be as wide as 2.5mm. Which allows a reading down to within a range of 0.2C when looked at head on. So should do a good job at recording the temp.
Hey… I bought the moon along time ago. I have a certificate to prove it. So… No trespassing, got it?
Hey Sam, since you own the moon, here is an exclusive offer for you: I’ll sell you the bridge to get to it, really cheap. I’ll even accept crypto-currency. Hurry, this is a limited-time offer.
A check is in the mail. d;^)
MOU for Protection of indigenous sacred sites, signed 11/21.
As Obama said, “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to eff things up.”
The “Outer Space Treaty” of the UN, signed by the US and entered into force in October 1967, specifically states that the signatories (“States”) “shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.”
— ref: https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/introouterspacetreaty.html
Therefore, I’m with Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren on this: sending human remains to contaminate the surface of the Moon—especially as lunar lander crash debris as is likely from an upstart company with ZERO experience in achieving gentle landings on the Moon—should be prohibited.
ANY human remains, even cremated remains, WILL harmfully contaminate the Moon’s surface as it will be unnatural to the composition of the lunar surface, which humanity has yet to fully scientifically characterize/document.
But maybe, for the US, their word is not longer their bond?
Hmmm . . . seems like native American tribes may have some prior experience with this, much to their regret.
Get stuffed, troll.
That would be “Mr. Turkey” to you.
Please expand on your point – especially how remains in a sealed container constitute ‘harmful contamination’ to the moon, please? A full chemical analysis might be helpful, but not essential in this case.
Seems like more chemical damage would/could/has potentially already happened from the 6 Apollo missions and various Chinese, Indian and Russian Lunar missions.
Last time I checked, rocket propellant from the 60s and 70s was toxic.
But just to be sure they should ask all existing Lunar Lifeforms if THEY have been affected.
Last time I checked, all rocket propellants vaporize/sublimate under solar radiation and the hard vacuum present at the lunar surface. Consequently, there is no such thing as even short-term toxicity of a vented propellant at an absolute pressure of, oh, about 10^-12 torr.
As regards “existing Lunar Lifeforms”, please provide any scientific evidence that you can that establishes there is no possibility of any form of life existing at any depth below the lunar surface and any location on the Moon.
In attempting to do so you might want the consider https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/did-life-evolve-in-ice
and the fact that at least one credible study points to the existence of thick ice deposits on the moon buried below the surface (https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/more-water-ice-on-moon).
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
— Hamlet, William Shakespeare
There might be some black swans on the moon. You never know.
As far as contamination goes, I’d much rather have those remains contaminating some remote isolated desolated celestial body than have them contaminating the earth. People have to live here, you know.
There are little yellow beings with holes throughout their torsos. I believe they originate from Switzerland
LOL . . . you’re only, oh, about 110 billion bodies too late for that.
https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/
Don’t see anything wrong with a hard landing. Digs the mass grave and buries the coffin in one easy step
Is that kind of like the newly offered EV coffins/crematoria! Instead of trying to put the battery fire out, the provider just lets it burn a hole into the ground and then buries it! Easy peasy!
Everybody at the funeral will definitely be all choked up!
It’s not a Fault, it’s a Feature
That all depends on how “hard” the landing is . . . the LCROSS mission that observed the impact of the second stage of the rocket that launched it toward the Moon observed an impact plume greater than 5 km altitude and greater than 10 km wide at its greatest magnitude, with the plume having about a 90-degree included angle. Impact debris likely spread more than 100 km from the impact site due to the absence of any atmospheric drag at the lunar surface.
With high enough impact velocity, your referenced “coffin” will be vaporized and not buried.
Poke your gonna
Poke your hontas
I’ve got a great recipe for salmon poke….
I will wager that they were in stitches when they sent that one off. Just imagining all the knots the government bureaucrats would tie themselves into.
They are most likely having a good laugh at the governments expense. The Navajo have long memories and will enjoy the irony.
“”NASA has yet to respond.
Yet? That’s a bit odd, maybe the holidays?
NASA’s usually really good at just making sh!t up.
Someone should ask KJP about this at a White House press conference. Or perhaps VP Kamala Harris, as the official administration space cadet. It would make for an amusing word salad.
When asked about leaving human remains on the Moon, Harris said:
“Of course the remains will be left on the Moon, otherwise they wouldn’t be called remains. That’s what remains mean, when you remain something it becomes remains because if you didn’t there would be nothing remaining to call remains.”
How do you say “FU” in Navajo?
From a distance.
I don’t know but in car sales it is “trust me”.
Why would you want to?
Shouldn’t they be worried about whatever it is the Chinese are doing on the far side of the Moon?
Or is it: out of sight out of mind?
They are planning, or currently building, a military base. The US should know soon.
The US needs to build the Moon base and withdraw from any treaty that would make that illegal.
Thank GOD that SpaceX and the other American private space transportation companies exist. There should be the capability to deliver all the equipment and supplies for such a base to a suitable orbit, refuel whatever booster/landers necessary, and set the materials safely wherever they are needed, within 2 years. All that is necessary in a new POTUS and Republican house and senate.
Playing Pink Floyd?
If I’m reading that right, then in this case that means places from which the moon can be seen, not the moon itself. But I suppose the aim is to throw a legal spanner in the works for a few years.
I can imagine that NASA may be only too happy to comply with the demand to delay its moon launch of human remains. NASA is never in a hurry. It has been over 50 years since their last ‘visit’ to the Moon.
Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren: ” ……. sacred sites can consist of places that afford views of important areas of land, water, or of the sky and celestial bodies.”
How many wind turbine farms and solar panel farms currently reside on lands which tribal leaders consider to be sacred sites — places that afford views of important areas of land, water, or of the sky and celestial bodies?
Nope, no delays.
Spending millions to get your burned ass on the moon is for the exclusive few which is a sign for the Aliens to leave the solar system to stay away from the madness.
Government promotion of New World religions is coming back to bite it. Maybe MaunaKea was sacred to native Hawaiians but the National Park Service’s half-century-old claim that Rainbow Bridge was sacred to five (now six) native American tribes ( https://www.nps.gov/rabr/learn/historyculture/index.htm ) is off the scale ridiculous. It would be interesting to know how far the arch is from the nearest archeological site–the bridge is situated on some of the most inaccessible and inhospitable country on the continent.
Maybe during the last ice age some Clovis man hunting mammoths chanced on the bridge, but even he would have been lucky to live to tell anyone. Powell sure didn’t have the leisure to explore much of the area, and rubber rafts and horses were the only transportation other than hiking. “[T]rappers, prospectors, and cowboys”? Not within 100 miles–beaver sure didn’t build the dam. It’s possible a late Navajo on horseback spotted the bridge before any pioneers did but it’s a pretty safe bet no pilgrimages were ever made to it. Rainbow Bridge was never sacred to native Americans until dam opponents urged them to say so.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the Colorado and Lake Powell, and seen some of the Anasazi ruins under the cliffs along the river. The cliff dwellers had a hard life growing corn and trying to keep it out of the hands of raiders. Powell assumed with good reason that the raiders were invading Athabaskans–he knew well that Navajo and Apache were Athabaskan languages, and in his day it wasn’t politically incorrect to identify them as the culprits.
But you need dirt and water to grow corn and the further south you float on the Colorado the less vegetation and animal life you see. Camping on the lake I’ve seen lizards and scorpions; I even found a frog in a rain puddle a mile or two from the lake–they must find mud to estivate. But it’s slim pickin’s for any but desert dwellers, and folk and their lore do not thrive in such places. Moderns with axes to grind take up the slack. –AGF
PS, more nonsense:
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/rainbow-bridge-a-traditional-cultural-property.htm
A high-def sat photo:
Powel didn’t have rubber rafts. He had wooden boats.
He traveled down the Colorado 2 times. And he did it with one arm.
Places with human remains are sacred, but having human remains in a sacred place desecrates it.
Uh huh. Next bit of lunacy, but please add some level of improvement.
Oh but you forget: “Our human remains are sacred but your human remains are a desecration.” Not all human remains are considered equal, apparently.
Where do we find people this f*cking stupid? Oh, yeah, colleges.
Neil Armstrong left his white privileged footprints all over that bitch .