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Chinese Want To Capture an Asteroid
geekmansworld writes "The Chinese want to capture an asteroid into earth's orbit and mine it. From the article: 'At first glance, nudging an asteroid closer to Earth seems like one of those "what could possible go wrong" scenarios that we generally try and avoid, and for good reason: large asteroid impacts are bad times. The Chinese, though, seem fairly optimistic that they could tweak the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid by just enough (a change in velocity of only about 1,300 feet-per-second or so) to get it to temporarily enter Earth orbit at about twice the distance as the Moon.'"
Since such a thing would be put the entire planet at risk, the world governments should tell China that they MUST share the resources for free if we all share the risk. Even in doing so, I think its not a good idea. Far too risky to be talking about it with our current under-developed space program. If we had the capability to launch vehicles on a day's notice and tow large objects around with ease, then that would be different. Better to either mine it where it is, or make it orbit Mars or something. 24 trillion per asteroid? I would think that would quite easily pay for a nice setup on Mars. They have to go to space anyways.
Of course at the same time, there is risk in them altering any asteroid trajectory at all.
Obviously.
What? Tibet and maybe Taiwan isn't enough for them? Their claims on Okinawa are laughable though serious to them... and now they want an asteroid too? Their land-grabbing is just getting out of hand.
Nothing possiblee could go wrong. Except for that.
indefinitely, in spite of international protests of its innocence
Why don't they park it in a Lagrange point?
So it can be JUST AS far away as the moon.
It's a research paper. It's 2 guys looking at the possibility for the sake of their course grade/diploma. It doesn't mean there's a plan, or a will, or even a wish. Come on editors, click through your links and understand your articles before approving crappy summaries.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Greeat, so China can muck up LEO with even more junk: wrenches, shovels and shit load of gravel, dust. We might be stuck here forever if the mining plan works out.
Take off every 'sig' !!
You want to get the U.S. federal government and military to invest in a technology like space mining? Tell them that China is going to be pulling an asteroid, essentially an orbital continental bomb, into Earth orbit in a controlled manner to "mine" it. I gaurantee you the DoD will start modding the OTV and any other space assets it has to wrangle some of their own asteroid "mines" into Earth orbit as well, conveniently positioned in an orbit that allows an impact point on top of China in the event of a de-orbit.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
What resource is of a high enough value to warrant the extreme costs of mining it in space and returning it to earth? The article just says "mining". Rare earth metals are about the only thing I can think of. Even something like diamonds (assuming they even exist in asteroids) wouldn't be worthwhile, because if you brought back a huge load of them then the value of diamonds as a global market will decrease because of the massive supply.
Better known as 318230.
I'm still going with "what could possibly go wrong."
Crash it on the moon instead, then mine the heck out of it. Or else orbit it around the moon and push the ore back to Earth.
Realistically, though, this stuff is going to need a space elevator to economically get the ore back down to Earth.
I used to believe those nations who control the skies will be the top powers, but now I think more likely it's those nations or corporations that control the ladders up to the skies that will really hold all the cards.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
I think the interesting point is to have these resources in orbit. so this can be used the build space ships or a really big station.
Bringing it down to earth is probably expensive, but using it in space would save the fuel needed to bring that material up.
A 10m object. Even if there were a non-destructive way to get the material earthside, there wouldn't be enough material to make it worth while. It's a mighty expensive technology demo, otherwise.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The Ballistic Missile Defense System has nothing against this.
How did
Two Chinese scientists propose to nudge a ten-meter asteroid nearing earth in 2049 into an earth orbit
transform into
"The Chinese want to capture an asteroid into earth's orbit and mine it" ?
Sure, mining asteroids is a great idea, in principle, but not in theory.
You must provide thrust in accelerate the mass to the appropriate velocity to maintain steady orbit.
Are they kidding?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
even if they do get it into a stable orbit around us, what's to stop something else (another asteroid) that we'd usually not worry about (because it wasn't going to come too close) going ahead and hitting the orbiting asteroid, and possibly sending it our way (or just destabilizing it's orbit).
I guess there's lots of things they could do...but all of them have risks...does the reward out-weigh the risk (and the effort)?
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
The headline makes it sound like this is a plan of the Chinese government, or a desire of the Chinese people as a whole. Instead, according to the article, it's an idea from two researchers at a Chinese university. It is just an idea at this stage, not something anybody has expressed a desire to do.
If it was "black people" or "the Jews" instead of "the Chinese," we would be offended by this headline. But since the Chinese government is unpopular in America, it's a good chance to take a subtle and unwarranted jab at "those crazy Chinese, who will probably kill us all."
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
*Stop port scanning me
*Stop sending me spam
*Stop trying to hack my servers
*Stop firewalling the Internet
*Stop polluting so much
*Stop allowing human trafficking
*Stop oppressing your people
*On and on...
If you can't get a handle on these things, have you any hope on controlling an asteroid?
Ignore the "capture an asteroid... and mine it." Chinese propaganda. The Chinese have uncovered an ancient recipe for building weapons of ass destruction. This recipe requires gobs and gobs of "Panda Poo" and an "Asteroid."
Just throw a Master Ball, problem solved. I'm sure they'd try to use one of the cheap plastic ripoffs that's made in China, though.
Additional Pokemon/Slashdot pun for good measure: China used Asteroid Mining! Bitcoins scattered everywhere!
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
This minecraft hype went too far, we should stop it.
One large asteriod can destroy all life on the planet, but a refrigerator or bus-sized asteroid can destroy a town or a city, which cannot be stopped.
Great way of holding the world ransom... threatening death via asteroid.
Mining will eventually be undertaken in the next 100 years or so, but it will only partake within the asteroid belt or near some other planet.
After talking with my dog, I believe there is a typo in the headling of this story; it should read, "The Chinese Want To Capture an ASS."
Now they can threaten to crash asteroids into the earth if we don't agree to cutting treasonous federal spending!
"try and avoid"?? Stupid people with stupid grammar mistakes. That's much better stated as "try to avoid". Learn from it and don't make anymore mistakes my 6-year-old wouldn't make. Thanks.
To follow your logic, we should all share the cost of the mission and the mining expenses?? I don't think so. If they are willing to take on the expense of making this happen, they should (and will) get the majority of the payout.
Just crash it into your homeland. That way you can see what effect your current resource policies have on your own nation - and haphazardly the rest of the world.
I was out to lunch with a group of people and the subject of space exploration came up. Having worked at NASA and LPI (albeit 30 years ago), I expressed my various opinions (e.g., the Shuttle was a mistake and we lost 30-40 years by NASA's hindering private enterprises from space launch systems). The subject of mining asteroids came up; I said that it could provide some long-term benefits, but I would be very, very leery about moving an asteroid into near-Earth orbit, for all the obvious reasons.
That said, moving a 10-meter asteroid into earth orbit carries (IMHO) relatively few risks. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
I thought the Onion already reported that Kim Jong Il has much more ambitious plans to capture the moon already? It's already in the zone, we just need a bunch of rockets to fly it down to North Korea, right?
I8-D
This! Is! Slashdot!
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
This is Slashdot. We are technology and sci fi enthusiasts. This idea gives me a cerebral boner, it gets me excited, fills me with awe at human endeavour. And if you don't feel the same way, what the bleep are you doing posting on Slashdot?
Also, I'm not a dumb chest thumping tribal nationalist, so if the Chinese should be able to do it, credit to them, I bow before their accomplishment, and sour grapes is really not the bleeping point.
Finally, if all you can do is whine about fear and lack of trust in technical acumen and science and an unhealthy aversion to modest risk, with a brain informed more by Michael Bay movies than actual fucking science and tech, then you really are posting on the wrong fucking site, and frankly, sign off and fuck off and stop polluting these forums with your feeble mind.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Wouldnt the comet pull us out of orbit?
In 1997 Jim Benson formed a company called SpaceDev, with the primary intent of doing exactly this. They funded their main R&D through microsatellite launches. Sadly, Benson died in the early 2000's and the company was bought out. I invested quite a bit and was hopeful for the future.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
to economically ^W get the ore back down to Earth.
That's just silly talk. Obviously a big part of the value of this material is that it is already in space.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I remember, as an ardent newcomer to L5, talking about exactly this sort of thing with Eric Drexler in a park somewhere in the Bay Area, back in 1983. What the heck, good luck to the Chinese. Maybe they'll even do it. (although the delta-V required is truly staggering, even for the kind of intercept described)
1. Read a Stephen Baxter novel and get an idea.
2. Find exactly the right size asteroid and change it's orbit to collide with Earth at a point near Washington D.C.
3. Use a cover story about mining the asteroid even though that makes no economic sense. The same minerals can be found on Earth.
4. Accept the gratitude of the rest of the world.
5. Claim the giant crater where the U.S. used to be for the People's Republic of China.
6. ???
7. Profit.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Sure it would be worth a heck of a lot of money on earth, but it would not be on earth. Getting it down to earth would be very expensive, and dangerous. Having large chunks of metal ready to be dropped to the earth would be a lot like having a large number of nuclear weapons in orbit, only it would not leave a nuclear wasteland and people could rationally use it to conquer land. Not a good idea.
Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton as consultants.
Remember the Tunguska event?
> "Different studies have yielded varying estimates of the object's size, with general agreement that it was a few tens of metres across."
Depending on where it hit, a 10m wide object could easily wipe out tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of people.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
looks like the Chinese are almost as arrogant as the Americans now.
Ok, I get that this is just a research paper as per a comment above, but I do have a criticism. The potential for a collision aside, won't this significantly effect our tides and orbit as well? The ramifications would be myriad: altered day and/or year length, asteroid eclipses, irregular tides wrecking havoc on marine life, higher high tides and lower low tides in an era of climate change and potentially rising seas ...
Regardless of the direction of the nudge, we must pursue the technology. As we learn more about NEO nudging, it will apply equally to either case: towards or away. One day, we may need to implant some automated solar sails and a nuclear pulse engine on a larger NEO to keep it from impacting our little "pale blue dot" on its next pass!
Invenio via vel creo
Even though it's only a 10-meter asteroid, that's pretty much correct.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The plan of bringing it in so it is barely bound and letting it wander off some years later sounds much more dangerous than bringing it into a proper orbit.
What will that asteroid do over the following centuries/millenia? We would have to monitor it forever and might need to nudge it again later. I'm also not sure if there are any truly stable orbits around the Earth, given the size of our moon driving it. Maybe there is some resonance with the moon's orbit that is safe. If so, that seems the best place to put it, and leave it there forever.
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
We're talking about capturing an asteroid that already has interacted with earth and will once again come close to earth anyway. the slingshot effect of earth can add or take up to 60 km /sec, moon contribute 2km/sec more, together or earth alone more than enough delta-V to play with. The means of capture would be the same for deflecting any asteroid of one mile or more that is threat to earth. Gravity tractor with 2000 ton mass, darkening or lightening to change push from Sun, ion engine pushing over months, etc. The e
1300 ft/sec = 410 m/s (per TFA) = 920 mph = 1500 km/h
What's sad is that TFA gives the value in m/s, which is a pretty standard physics unit for velocity, so someone had to 'helpfully' convert it to a rather obscure unit. Aside from bullets (niche usage), ft/sec is used for stuff that's slow, much like ft/year is used for tectonic plates; mph is used for transit speeds, and miles per second for astronomic speeds. Don't convert to a smaller unit just to produce bigger numbers, as they are difficult to visualize. I'm seriously tempted to write a greasemonkey script to do these conversions automatically, it's become a theme for Slashdot...
We haven't started to mine the moon yet and we want to aim for an asteroid?
Sure, illegal interception of the intergalactic parcel post is a nice entry to the rest of the universe!
Wait till the Zargons come around looking for their bundle of palladium and naquadah, and we've not even made parole since last time (whatever it was we did to the sphinx or something).
blog.sam.liddicott.com
I say the world should focus on capturing those elusive alien spacecraft first. Once we've got our hands on their technology, we can worry about space economics.
expletives welcomed
In other news I want to capture a Leprechaun so I get his pot of gold.
I see this having about an equal chance of happening in my lifetime.
Sure, and then they'll hollow it out in a series of chambers, except in the seventh chamber they'll perform some experiment that makes it extend beyond the end of the asteroid and open portals to other alternate universes along that tunnel for trade, while also yanking the whole asteroid out of one universe and depositing it in the past of another.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
In his book "Titan" the Chinese bring an asteroid in to Earth orbit with the express intention of dropping it on the US. A miscalculation in the size of the rock ends up wiping out all of humanity.
In this case, they state they want to mine, which is fantastic, we should be doing it right now, but the dragging in to Earth orbit part not so much. There are plenty of NEOs that will provide a much less entire race crushing experience and maybe even net you some better minerals.
So why not just mine the moon? I mean, it's already in a stable orbit, has some limited gravity to keep things from floating away, and is (hopefully) not going to "accidentally" come crashing down on top of us if something happens to go wrong. Do they even know that this passing asteroid has anything worth mining? Seems like an awfully big expenditure for something that could turn out to be a big fat dud.
Think on a very big amount of easy to extract iridium, platinum....
While these will certainly help the bulk of the asteroid will still be metals which are relatively cheap on earth. I imagine that the biggest cost benefit will be from having those metals available in space. With launch costs to high orbits being around $20k/kg (based on a quick Google search) and the bulk cost of iron being around $0.20/kg (Google search) the major cost advantage will be having the metal already there in orbit and ready to build things. This assumes that it costs less than $20k/kg to mine it though!
Tunguska had about 500 times the kinetic energy of an impact this would have.
Did you even read the wiki page you linked?
"A stony meteoroid of about 10 metres (30 ft) in diameter can produce an explosion of around 20 kilotons, similar to that of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and data released by the U.S. Air Force's Defense Support Program indicate that such explosions occur high in the upper atmosphere more than once a year. Tunguska-like megaton-range events are much rarer. Eugene Shoemaker estimated that such events occur about once every 300 years.[29][30]"
Hey, if we just had a big pulley (something akin to the "Space Elevator" concept), we could put masses on earth that we want lifted into space onto a cable on one side of the pulley, and attach the mass which was mined from the asteroid which we want to deliver to earth, attached to the 'short end' of the cable on the other side of the pulley.
This would allow us to use the gravitational potential energy of the asteroid mass ("free energy" for all practical purposes - energy the universe already imparted to that mass for us, anyhow) to raise up the space-bound payload, while using the space-bound payload as a counterweight to control the descent of the mass of mined ore from the asteroid.
Now women will have two menstrual cycles.
Pretty soon there will only be a 15 minute/year window of opportunity, and with our luck, that's right when her Mom will call.
'At first glance, nudging an asteroid closer to Earth seems like one of those "what could possible go wrong" scenarios that
You mean other than the summary?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Whatever. Everyone knows Tunguska was really caused by an alien spacecraft losing antimatter containment.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
I don't suppose it occurred you that this technology is also a weapons system, a WMD class weapons system.
With all the political calls saying we should go to the Moon or Mars, I've been an advocate that our next big manned mission should be to an asteroid for evaluating how to mine it. Sadly, the conservative parties in the US seem hellbent on dumbing down the American public and emptying their pockets and minds than they are at building up the country and making it productive again.
Earth is running very short on critical metals and rare earths that we need to support our current civilization and future growth. More than ever, space exploration needs to show economic return to those communities supporting the endeavor. I've not heard any evidence of the moon containing any needed mineral deposits we need. Mars, we've just barely scratched the surface (pun intended) and we don't know what is to be found on that planet. Considering how expensive it is to send things there, much less people, we need to be able to show as much of an economic return as a scientific return.
The Moon does lend itself well to a base to practice techniques needed elsewhere. Where better to work out the techniques needed to mine and smelt ore in an airless, low gravity environment than a place where help and rescue is just a few days away, instead of a few months? It also lends itself well for scientific uses, such as setting up a major astronomical observatory. Improved astronomical observation brings a longterm economic return by improving our understanding of how the physics of our universe works and how to possibly circumvent our current limitations, such as gravity or the speed of light. Also, it improves our chances of finding another world to populate before Earth becomes uninhabitable.
While there is no solid proof aside from meteorites that have made it to Earth's surface, there is evidence that there are many asteroids that may be rich in metals needed by our current civilizations. My opinion is we should be turning our attention to finding these gold mines among the stars and exploiting them. That's certainly worth more than ruining the environment we currently need to survive!
Whew! This water sure is cold!
What I find laughable is how you just pointed-out a little-known fact about the Moon: when NASA astronaughts collected "moon rocks" to gift to countries around the world, what few realized is they didn't give anyone peices of the Moon but of debris that landed on the Moon.
Looking at your implications to landing minerals onto a planet, I would conclude that ther is a possibility that impure celestial bodies may have a balance of minerals that could cause their landing to either detonate, disintegrate from friction on entry, or cause atomic drift from the crater they create upon landing. I think it would be a fine experiment if someone directs a pure-carbon mass to impact a planet surface in hopes it might explode into a crater of diamonds.
nope.jpg
Did we learn nothing from the plight of the USG Ishimura?
Talk of asteroid mining and deorbiting of said resource satellite sounds very MS Gundam .
I'm sure the Chinese read Arthur C. Clarke and Dan Simmons and intend to share all their wealth with all the people in the world living on $1 a day. Look at all their humanitarian work in Zimbabwe and other African countries for example.
Muppet Show > Monty Python
What resource is of a high enough value to warrant the extreme costs of mining it in space and returning it to earth? The article just says "mining". Rare earth metals are about the only thing I can think of.
The English name `rare` eart metals is unfortunately chosen. They're not necessarily rare, the ores are found all over the world.
Why not mine the moon first?
If the Chinese want to build interplanetary space craft, the best way to do so is to mine/refine the metals in space and then build said craft in space, outside of the Earths gravity well. It saves vast amounts of resources if thought out. Nowhere in the article does it suggest that the refined products would be Earthbound, and this makes sense if building a large enough craft and infrastructure to manufacture said craft.
Ultimate Darwin Award
I absolutely forbid this this. I think I have a few people who can back me up.
China is starting to dream big. That is a good thing. Hopefully, the dreamers will take over their gov. and stop their cold war.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This would be a really good weapon. Seriously - grab a giant asteroid and slam it into North America.
or else!
The idea of building Solar Power Satellites, where solar energy is produced in orbit and beamed back to earth as microwaves, has around since the 1970's. Using spaced-based resources, like an asteroid, is likely to reduce the costs substantially. For more, check-out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power.
The Chinese claimed everything at one time. Only the barbarians were too dumb to know it.
What do you think you'd do with a captured asteroid?
...
Classical Chinese poetry would be more appropriate, but on another blog I frequent it's not uncommon to rip off William Carlos Williams.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
s/try and/try to/
earth/Earth?
There's already laws to stop mining stuff like this. They can't just grab a planet/moon/asteroid. On the other hand, a private citizen can and someone probably already owns it.
This is even more dangerous than the plan to terraform Mars by smashing a very large number of icy asteroids on it.
What I'd suggest is mine them where they are, send the scoop into Earth orbit, jump to the next asteroid, repeat. Less energy expenditure and no problem with chaff orbiting Earth.
The process might be improved with a self-replicating machine.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Yes, I am sure he can.
Although I think David Tennant was the best of the modern Doctors, Matt Smith seems to be doing OK.
Helwo Amerca!
In communist China, asteroid captures you!
I was at an SF convention in DC in 1979. A NASA speaker (or so I remember) showed a picture of an asteroid mine in earth orbiting, with a fun picture of a steel slab pushing out of it.
Yep, we used to think big. Now we just whine at other people who do.
I agree, the world can use more dreamers from all countries. But wait, cold war? With us? Damn them for shipping manufactured goods to us as fast as they can stuff them into the shipping containers! If the Chinese are at war with anyone, it's with their own people, and even then neither cold or war are really the right words. The term cold war doesn't seem to have any bearing.
We shipped food and all sorts of goods to USSR and China with them. In fact, it was by getting their money that we bankrupted USSR. But when a nation spies on another to the degree that China does, and is attacking via the internet, yeah, that is Chinese Gov's cold war with the west, esp. America. To say otherwise, is just simply lying to yourself.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What is that D going to be tho?
A war between the US and China would pretty much negate the US having to pay back all that debt, right? It would be a quick way to balance the books.
Read this.
It's a book by Smedley Butler, two time recipient of the Medal of Honor. This is an excerpt from a speech he delivered:
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
He also predicted Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. He's a man worth listening to. Personally the situation with China terrifies me.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
... why we haven't seen good evidence of 'advanced' civilizations. When they get advanced enough to try space travel, they try stupid things like this and accidentally destroy themselves.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Tap tap tap..... ooops
Threatening Earth with an asteroid is something Dr. Evil would do.. for a billion dollars....
And the USA could pretty much ignore the asteroid anyway, since we still have a robust nuclear arsenal. I'm sure the ones in subs would be more than enough to take the rest of humanity with us, in the event that the impact from a giant asteroid doesn't do the trick in the first place.
Disturbing thought? How about the possibility that the finger on that red button could be Michelle Bachmann's in a year?
Frightening, isn't it?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Spending billions of dollars to sight see and lolly-gag around the solar system. We need to mine our solar system for resources. That should be the primary goal of ALL space exploration. Do that first and we'll let our space pioneers look out the window once and a while to enjoy the view or have what every hobby they have like futilely looking for life.
Besides, we have all the life we can possibly stand here on earth, so much life that we have to think up new and inventive ways to kill it off.
Come on, NASA. Who is in charge? What are you thinking? Please put somebody in charge who actually can help us figure out how to stay alive. Get it? Figure out how to help us, humanity, stay alive first.
We need resources to stay alive.
God damn, how can you be so fucking stupid?
We need to trust these guys. They are after all scientists and therefore very smart and careful. I mean really. It's not like these guys would ever make a mistake that could cause this thing to slow too much and enter our atmosphere.
And even if they did, how bad would it really be. Just a crater 24 miles wide and trees 200 miles away would spontaneously burst into flames but hey, there is definitely a small chance that it will kill a lot of people. And after all this thing could be worth something like 25 trillion dollars! Isn't it the little peoples duty to risk and lay down their lives so that extremely rich people can get even richer?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
But this raises a good point. What are the legal (treaty, I guess) ramifications of performing an experiment that has a significant (albeit probably small) chance of ending all life on earth?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So they can create a cheap copy that will of course miss its orbit and fall apart..
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
I bet this is what happened to the Martians, they tried to capture an asteroid and ended up cracking their moon in half.
i understand doing this to mine materials, but could it be used for other things? i mean, say an asteroid was predicted to crash into earth and kill millions of people? could we use what we learn from this experience to nudge the asteroid into orbit?
Whatever. Everyone knows Tunguska was really caused by an alien spacecraft losing antimatter containment.
That's what they want you to think. Everyone who really knows what's going on knows it was a microminiature black hole fired at us by the Greys, and in 2012 it will finally hit the sharp edge of the exponential curve and consume our entire planet.
The Mayans knew man!
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
*IF* this could be done, it would make the nuclear arms race look like a spitball contest. The threat of orbital bombardment would pretty much end any discussion of conflict.
its only 10 meters long... so once they get it in the orbit weather its 2x that of moon they can simply capture it? and but 2049 we should have a new space station to mine it ... or even a moon base it could be landed onto cuz its quite small tbh
If anything US grain and consumer product shipments helped the Soviet economy stay afloat longer than it would have otherwise. The Soviet Union bankrupted itself with it's poor centralized planning and its unsustainable military spend rate -- to 'fight' an actual cold war. Not that that's doing anything to slow down our unsustainable military spend rate.
...as in, back on usenet in the mid-nineties, when I was trying to get *anyone's* attention to grab Toutatis, which came between the Earth and Moon. It would have been hard but achievable, and, if pushed to geosync, would give us a *real* space station, a place we could put a *lot* of hardware on (instead of many, many separate satellites, and maintenance would be much easier than another launch mission), and provide shielding while above the Van Allen belt.... and from which real spaceships could shuttle, at a much, much lower cost than the stupid one-rocket-to-the-moon-or-Mars.
And btw, if the US had any real space capability left, Toutatis is coming close next year in Dec....
mark
slight off topic, but i hate how they say "the chinese", its like 1.3 bil people as a whole decide to capture an asteroid