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
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Cecil says:
“ It is part and parcel of the Reenchantment of Nature – a book by a old “social ecology”Marxist by the name of Murry Bookchin who I got to know slightly through my participation in the group planning the formation of the National Center for Appropriate Technology when we met at Goddard College in Vermont where he was creating his anarchists program for the revitalization of everything! So MB would be doing back flips over the Navaho counter-colonizing the Moon and the domain of Nature by their brave and self confident extension of their cultural and spiritual stewardship of the moon. So I applaud this heroic action. It is not irrational. It is an act of extreme reverence and has to do with acknowledging the spiritual reality of the Cosmos!! Thank you for calling this important symbolic action to my attention. Thank God for WUWT. They are reminding us of Sir Francis Bacon’s Dictum: ‘Man only commands nature when he obeys her!’”
His comment arrived after I spent the day touring telescopes on Kitt Peak. From the peak you can see Arrowhead Peak a few miles away. That too is sacred territory and, as far as we could determine, no one can climb there without permission and certainly not bury someone.
It is interesting that the Kitt Peak telescopes are built on sacred territory – 200 leased acres – and are determining the atmospheric composition of exoplanets orbiting nearby stars. The Lessees are finding new territories to explore while the Lessors are reminding us that we should not despoil the reachable parts of the universe simply because we can.
The example of near-Earth space junk is apropos. More than half of it would not be there if we were not planning on killing each other. Compared with the neighbouring planetary civilizations we are Hell itself. No wonder they avoid us.
Perhaps the next moon landing should include ground penetrating radar to search for remains while we’re at it.
Einstein was right. Human stupidity *is* infinite.
If only there was a private way to get there and write MAGA in big red letters.