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.'"

Comments

Re:China, don't get ahead of yourself.

[Dishevel]

While I agree with most of your post ...
Can we please quit with the space elevator stuff?
At least until we have a material that we can mass produce that will make something like a space elevator possible and practical. Can we just shut up about it?
I do think we should continue looking at material sciences and when we have something that can practically do the job I am all for it. Till then though there are many things we can be doing that don't make us seem like dipshits.