You've entered the Paracast with your host, Gene Steinberg and David Biedney.

Stan Friedman is back with a brand new book called Flying Saucers in Science, subtitled

A Scientist Investigates the Mysteries of UFOs.

Now, in the book, you go into a lot of your own history as a nuclear physicist and the fact

that you seem to get stuck on projects that were always canceled.

Yeah.

Now, before we go on, did any of these projects actually go to fruition, or did they just say, well, that said, Stan, you've got to look for a new job?

Well, in a sense, they did go to this.

Some of them did anyway.

I mean, we did

operate jet engines on nuclear power at the aircraft, nuclear propulsion department of general

electric. We did operate nuclear rocket engines when I worked for Westinghouse Astra Nuclear

Lab. That was very exciting while it lasted. When I worked, one of my shortest jobs was at TRW's systems in California,

working on the radiation levels from the power supply for the pioneer spacecraft,

and that left the Earth and has left the solar system, and it worked.

Yeah, but why are we still using chemical rockets to get people into space?

Well, wait, on the pioneer, that wasn't a propulsion system.

It was a power supply, electric power, because the sun intensity decreases as a square of the distance.

So, you know, you get out pretty far, and it ain't much sunlight there,

so you better use something that lasts almost forever,

and plutonium 238 is a good example of that.

Now, why would we use solar power on some of the deep space missions?

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