I know, not exactly 'space' but if the critics were right....

Earth 'not at risk' from collider
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News

Our planet is not at risk from the world's most powerful particle physics experiment, a report has concluded. ...

Critics are worried that mini-black holes made at the soon-to-open facility on the French-Swiss border might threaten the Earth's very existence.

But the report, issued the European Organization for Nuclear Research, says there is "no conceivable danger".

The organization - known better by its French acronym, Cern - will operate the collider underground in a 27km-long tunnel near Geneva.

This Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a powerful and complicated machine, which will smash together protons at super-fast speeds in a bid to unlock the secrets of the Universe.

...in 2003, Dr Adrian Kent, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, wrote a paper in which he argued that scientists had not adequately calculated the risks of a "killer strangelet" catastrophe scenario.

He also expressed concern that a fundamental question (how improbable does a cataclysm have to be to warrant proceeding with an experiment?) had never been seriously inspected.

The LHC was due to switch on in 26 November 2007. The start-up has been postponed several times, however, and is currently scheduled for later this summer.

The first delay was precipitated by an accident in March 2007 during stress testing of one of the LHC's "quadrupole" magnets.

A statement carried on the Cern website from the US laboratory that provided the magnet stated that the equipment had experienced a "failure" when supporting structures "broke".

It later emerged that the magnet had exploded in the tunnel, close to one of the LHC's most important detectors, prompting the the facility to be evacuated.