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

We can't even send a man into LEO anymore, people!

[NotDrWho]

Did anyone really think that NASA was seriously going to not only divert an asteroid to lunar orbit, but also send astronauts there??? NASA hasn't put anyone in lunar orbit in over 40 years. And they haven't even been able to put an astronaut in LEO for years.

Just visit the damn Moon

[gatkinso]

There it is! It has water, Helium-3, oxygen in the rocks. WTF is the problem?

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:Just visit the damn Moon

[Megane]

And we now have the best reason ever to go back to the moon. We must build an Olympic-size swimming pool on the moon!

Also, He3 is a very stupid reason to go to the moon. It requires level 2 nuclear fusion, and we haven't reached level 1 yet. lrn2civ noob

Re:Just visit the damn Moon

[__aaclcg7560]

A space ship is not designed to hold up against a salt water environment.

That was obvious in the last Star Trek movie.

Re:Just visit the damn Moon

[tlambert]

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.).

Too bad they don't just go ahead with the original DC-X plans; then they'd have a launch vehicle, an orbital transfer vehicle, a fuel tanker, and a lunar lander.

Oh, that's right; Boeing *ATE* McDonnell Douglas and cancelled it.

Well, they could have always finished off the National Aerospace Plane (the X-30), and separately developed a lander.

Oh, that's right, Boeing *ATE* Rockwell and cancelled it.
 
...I'm sensing a pattern here...

Re:Just visit the damn Moon

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It has nothing of the sort. The ocean has dissolved gold, platinum, and heavy hydrogen too, why don't you go there?

I think the idea is that anything in bulk lifted from the Moon is easier to get to Earth orbit than the same stuff lifted from Earth, so in the long run, it could make sense to supply LEO with bulk materials from the Moon. The same argument doesn't hold for deep sea resources and the places of their utilization.

Re:Just visit the damn Moon

[gatkinso]

There are great reasons to go back... none of them are financial. Which is why we won't be going back any time soon.

Won't be long before...

[__aaclcg7560]

NASA's budget will shrink so much that the asteroid will become a basketball being diverted into a hoop at Cape Canaveral.

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.

Re:Mars Needs Nothing

[tlambert]

Missions in preparation for going to Mars, what a waste. We aren't going to Mars in this century.

Besides, what does Mars have that the moon doesn't?

A couple of moons to build bases and way-stations on for asteroid mining, and whose escape velocity is so close to nothing that a spring-loaded catapult would be enough to launch spacecraft without burning a lot of expensive reaction mass.

Re:Voting

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Or,

A. Destroy Iraq,
B. Destroy Afganistan,
C. Do neither (save the money)

Re:We can't even send a man into LEO anymore, peop

[Beck_Neard]

It's amazing how NASA has gone from a genuinely benign government agency advancing the sciences to a parasitic organization that acts a distributor of government pork. And they have a lot of good PR for what they do - hordes of nerds echoing insanely stupid sentiments like 'penny on the dollar!!!'

It was sad enough when NASA's so-called 'mission to prepare for Mars' was actually a pathetic plan involving moving a tiny asteroid to Earth/Lunar orbit and then sending some astronauts up there to take selfies. But now the mission has been downscaled even beyond that level, to where they're basically fine if they can just get a electric propulsion system to work. This would be akin to downscaling the Apollo program to a test-stand demonstration of a rocket engine firing.

End NASA's manned space program. Fire NASA management. Focus on the stuff NASA does best (robotic exploration). Fuck the congresspeople who piggyback on enthusiasm for space to send money to their own districts.

Re:We can't even send a man into LEO anymore, peop

[Anonymous Coward]

Robotic exploration is EXTREMELY limited. The farther away the object you want to study, the more limited the kind of science you can make with a robot. A team of four scientists with a descender module and a rover for one of them can replicate the last 50 years of mars exploration in 3-4 days in orbit and 1 day on surface. 4-5 days to get the same science we gathered and much much more.