NASA Asteroid Capture Mission To Be Proposed In 2014 Budget

MarkWhittington writes "Included in President Obama's 2014 budget request will be a $100 million line item for NASA for a mission to capture and bring an asteroid to a high orbit around the moon where it will be explored by astronauts. Whether the $2.6 billion mission is a replacement or a supplement to the president's planned human mission to an asteroid is unclear. The proposal was first developed by the Keck Institite in April, 2012 and has achieved new impetus due to the meteor incident over Russia and new fears of killer asteroids."

Re:no purpose

[tragedy]

mostly annoying asteroid that broke Russian windows.

Right, the mostly annoying half megaton explosion that injured over a thousand people and hospitalized over a hundred, and caused tens of millions of dollars of property damage. Most of the damage was broken glass, but it did manage to collapse the roof of one factory. If it had managed to last another half a second or so before exploding, it probably would have killed a hundred thousand or more people. I guess, in the grand scheme of things, that might only count as mostly annoying, but not to the people who live there.

Re:Let Me Get This Straight Dept.

[khallow]

L2 is even more precious as it is the only fairly stable spot in the Earth-moon system where if you're not careful you fall into interplanetary space.

L1 through L3 are not stable points. L4 and L5 have weird dynamics, but things put there will stay there with extremely low delta v.

And you can "fall" into interplanetary space very easily (that is, with arbitrarily low, but well timed delta-v) from any of the Lagrange points. L2 is not unique in this respect.

Re:Sequester Fodder

[O('_')O_Bush]

Nice trolling. You had me thinking someone could actually believe that crock of conservative bullshitting until it got overwhelmingly stinky. Next time, try leaving out the part blaming the poor for our financial problems instead of massive wealth disparity and the part where you accuse the DNP of paying bribes but ignoring the bribes taken by the GOP to keep taxes minimal for economic predators and job destroyers.

As far as the 1.4 T$ wars fighting a distraction war against a minimally powerful and relatively (to real genocidal leaders in Asia and Africa) harmless dictator and the Afghan Government (at least, before they were replaced by American puppets and labeled 'insurgents' so they could be lumped with the phantom group, the few dozen member 'All Queda'). Those parts can be left in for Trolling success.