ars technica wrote:Visiting (and eventually mining) asteroids is viewed by space development advocates as an imperative stepping stone to making our way out into the solar system. One group of President Obama's advisors, the Augustine Commission, counseled that a manned asteroid mission might bring the highest payoff per dollar spent in terms of science and essential skills for space exploration. A study was also commissioned to check the feasibility of bringing a small asteroid—on the order of 10,000kg—back to the International Space Station. It reported no showstoppers.
Cal Tech's Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) commissioned a larger study beginning in September 2011 and issued its report earlier this month. In it, a who's who of people from at least 17 organizations suggest that we bring a much larger asteroid near the Earth and visit it there. After all, in the decade it would take to develop the skills and equipment we'll need to visit the asteroid belt, we could identify a target and make the tiny course corrections in its orbit necessary to have it arrive at our doorstep seven to ten years later.
Figuratively speaking, a small mountain really could come to Mohammed....
Full article is well worth the read. Let's do this!
But either way we really need this. I was arguing with this person about the budget cuts for our space exploration. It's the single most important thing we can possibly do. I put it to them this way: Imagine if we were stranded on a deserted island with a finite amount of resources and ever increasing population. Then imagine there was a group of shipbuilders and sailors on that island that were saying "We'll go out and look for more islands with resources, or a mainland, or maybe even civilization." Then imagine if they had spent a lot of time already building boats and looking in various directions and they didn't find something and if the collective leadership of your island said this was no longer important and just a waste of energy and resources. You'd look at them like they were psycho. How can someone be so content to remain stationary on a infinitely small speck of ever diminishing land when there is literally a totally alien unexplored universe out there?
I'd love to see this happen!
