DCAWD.com

Asteroid takeout—a one-billionaire mission to bring a 500-ton asteroid to Earth by 2025

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!

Weird. I was just having a discussion about this with someone a few days ago and how valuable mining one could prove to be. What's funny is we actually already have the technology to move/redirect asteroids. Or rather we have the knowledge as the easiest solution is actually gravitational pull from another body. The way I understand it, it doesn't really need much in the way of comparative mass to subtly start redirecting and pulling the asteroid. With just a slightly heavy unmanned spacecraft powered with an ion propulsion drive (dirt slow but "fuel" would last for freakin' ever) you could really make real progress at moving one.

EDIT: I guess I should have read the article as I just kind of repeated it 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?

pretty rad. i would vote for gabe to make this happen.

I'd love to see this happen!

ElZorro wrote:

@markokloos
Oh, sure. Mining mission in space. Whatever could go wrong, JAMES WEYLAND CAMERON?