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Newswire : Lunar sacrilege

24 January 1998

NASA’s decision to send astronomer Eugene Shoemaker’s ashes to the Moon has
ruffled the feathers of the native American Navajo Nation. Shoemaker, who died
in a car crash last July, had his ashes launched on the Lunar Prospector probe.
But Albert Hale, President of the Navajo Nation, says this is insensitive to his
people, for whom the Moon is sacred. “You can’t make everybody happy,” says John
Lawrence of the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

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