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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."
This is a program designed to be cut, to show that this administration is being 'fiscally responsible'... I expect many such 'pie-in-the-sky' projects to be proposed, only to be cut at the altar of fiscal responsibility... And blame the minority party for the cut as well.
Hey, if they can count as savings the money they don't spend on wars that have ended, why not propose wild plans to pump up the savings?
Do you know how much (in inflation-adjusted dollars) we have saved since we stopped fighting the Second World War these last 65+ years?!?!?!
Ken
". . . can I keep it . . . ?"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I think Obama has a ways to go to catch up to George Bush on vacation time.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
L4/L5 is valuable real estate. First nation to park a base there owns it.
We should send two.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Human's have to get out there. Not as entertainment, but because if humans remain exclusively on this rock and in near earth orbits, humans are a sitting duck. The lessons learned in getting humans into low earth orbit, then high earth orbit, then to establish permanent bases on the Moon and Mars, are going to be used to develop longer term programs for human interstellar travel, exploration and in time colonization.
Or we can just develop robots to go out and do that for us and roll over here on earth and give up.
You never know...
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.
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.