Space Cowboys Lasso Asteroid

[Don Richard]

No. that's not the latest C&W band, but NASA's plan to capture and bring an asteroid into Earth orbit for study. This project, to be completed before 2021, involves a robotic spacecraft powered by solar electric engines that will capture an asteroid in a bag then drag it into an orbit between the Earth and the moon where the gravitational forces of the two bodies are equal. The asteroid will stay in that orbit where it will be visited by astronauts and studied by scientists. This will be an ambitious project and will be used to test the SLS/Orion spacecraft system and will be an intermediate step for a manned Mars mission. It will also offer a way to deal with asteroids that get too close to Earth and will investigate the possibility of mining asteroids in the future. This effort will cause NASA's budget to nearly double and will need the support of Congress but it is supported by the President and is likely to move forward. Stay tuned.

[ZAKO]

I CAN SELL NASA ON A BUNCH OF ROCKS IN MY BACK YARD AT A GOOD PRICE,,

[Boxx]

I was reading along with interest, regarding this project, until it is mentioned that "... it is supported by the President..." Man oh, man... there is a catch to everything.... lol.

[Mallette]

As a passionate believer in space as what we were designed for, as well as a believer that most problems here can be solved by the resources out there this is certainly good news. I live in a NASA neighborhood and my wife works for the NASA arm that interfaces with universities and research institutes world wide.

That said, I feel like there is much more to this than meets the eye. A lunar colony is easy, cheap and safe, but administrations of both ruling parties have gradually reprogrammed the public to think of it as hard, expensive, dangerous, and of no use. The space program itself was gradually wound down and dismantled. I talk to scientists regularly who know that the value of lunar resources that are easily obtainable with current technology is simply incalculable. They don't have a clue as to what our objectives are and on what they are based.

Now, we're suddenly going to go out and push an asteriod back to "play with." Granted, it's also known that most asteriods have heavy metals (thnk, platinum and gold) in abundance, as well as other rare earths. Perhaps that's the deal. Of course, given the speed of government projects Planetary Resources may well have returned a dozen or so asteriords to earth orbit by then, as I believe their timeline for accomplishing their stated goals was in the 10 year or less range.

Certainly seems like a rather odd choice to me compared to the easy lunar colony option, from which such trips to inspect an asteroid would be easy, but I'll take it if it's the favored plan.

Dave

[ZAKO]

Its an expensive way to extract gold.

[mungkiman]

Maybe nickle?

[Mallette]

There is a great deal of ignorance in the public, much of it a product of political agendas, concerning the cost of space operations. Our figures are based on government programs and 50 year old technology. 30 years ago a cell phone cost around 5,000.00.

Elon Musk has cut the cost of getting into LEO by a factor of 20 over the space shuttle with his FIRST generation technology. Can you imagine how cheap it would be if we'd started down that road 40 years ago?

In any event, getting things back to earth is free. Gravity, donchaknow, and rocks don't much care about g force and such.

The concept of "precious metals" will disappear in the next 50 years or less. Space, near earth space, is rotten with the stuff and it's very easy to get at and even easier to get down to earth.

No serious scientist debates this, though they tend to remain silent in public due to the conditioning of people to think this is all really hard. The "really hard" part is the government and big business trying to figure out how long they can hold it off while the try to figure out how to deal with such massive change.

Meanwhile, of course, people starve and go without good jobs even though everything we need for the better life is just a little over a hundred miles above us.

Dave

[Daddy Dee]

Yeh. The lasso an asteroid project seems a bit out of the blue (disclaimer: I'm out of it, so maybe not) but i'm happy to see about anything on the menu. Lots to be learned from this one.