Commenting last year on the significance of the Tunguska event, former Apollo astronaut and chairman of the Board of Directors of the B612 Foundation, Rusty Schweickart, stated:"It's baffling to us why this would suddenly change," said one scientist familiar with the work. "It's unfortunate because there was this great synergy...a very good cooperative arrangement. Systems were put into dual-use mode where a lot of science was getting done that couldn't be done any other way. It's a regrettable change in policy."
Scientists say not only will research into the threat from space be hampered, but public understanding of sometimes dramatic sky explosions will be diminished, perhaps leading to hype and fear of the unknown.
Tunguska is a great reminder of what we will likely have to deal with in the next 10 years or so. We now know statistically that there are some 600,000 or more "Tunguskas" out there of which we have to date discovered less than 1%! While for those of us who have been working this issue it is clear that we can deflect such impact threats ... the primary prerequisite is that we know one is coming! We can't protect ourselves against something we don't know about.If a high-altitude cometary explosion did indeed destroy AF 447, then the decision by the US military (and government), announced by the mainstream press just a few days later, to impose a black out on all information about earth-bound space rocks is extremely worrying. Not only would the policy prevent evidence supporting the idea from being made public, it suggests that members of the US government and military know that a cometary explosion destroyed the Air France flight and that they suspect that more such events, perhaps over populated areas, are likely in the near future. As Victor Clube and Bill Napier make clear in their book Cosmic Winter, the potential dangers of a misidentification of a cometary explosion for a nuclear attack are great, and this new policy strongly suggests the additional danger of a deliberate misidentification by those controlling the data. Most horrifying, the policy makes clear the callous disregard for human life displayed by such a cavalier attitude to the withholding of information pertaining to what is clearly the greatest existential threat facing humanity today.
So the primary "message" of Tunguska is that it happened, it will happen again, and we can prevent it. but we have to find and track these smaller NEOs. Congress has spoken. They've told NASA to crank up a more powerful search program. NASA, however, has refused to act - or even to comply with Congress's request to recommend a search strategy and to estimate the budget needed to support it.
Their excuse? They don't have the budget to support it!Thanks, NASA.
Of course, while you and I are to be denied this information and left to our fate, tens of thousands of these self-styled elite members of government and society have at their disposal several massive underground bunker installations such as Mount Weather or Cheyenne Mountain and no doubt many others. With their 25 ton blast doors, fitness suites, air filters, mini power stations and fresh water reservoirs, tax payer's money has not been spared in ensuring the comfortable survival of the least eligible.