NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission May Not Actually Redirect an Asteroid

MarkWhittington writes: When President Obama first proposed visiting an asteroid in his 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center, many assumed that the mission would be a deep space mission to an Earth-approaching asteroid in its "native orbit" in voyage taking weeks. Then, NASA dropped the idea in 2013 favor of the Asteroid Redirect Mission in which a tiny asteroid would be diverted to lunar orbit to be visited by astronauts. Now, according to a Thursday story in Space News, the ARM might take place without redirecting an asteroid.

Comments

Re:Just visit the damn Moon

[k6mfw]

WTF is the problem?

no money for a lander. That's why Moon is off limits (human landings that is). Until NASA is given money for a lander, the moon is simply not discussed. Mars is discussed even though no money for lander or habitat module while getting there, but that's far off into the future (much like fusion power plants, flying cars, etc.).

Re:Won't be long before...

[CanadianMacFan]

Only if they can find a way to outsource the building of the hoop into 40+ states and create 10,000 jobs in order to gain enough support in Congress.