
NASA mulls plan to drag asteroid into Moon's orbit - ColinWright
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23039-nasa-mulls-plan-to-drag-asteroid-into-moons-orbit.html#.U15Ld6YjsaY
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hornetblack
They also worked with the guys at Kerbal Space Program to add an Asteroid
retrieval mission to KSP.[1]

[1]
[http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/274](http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/274)

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mturmon
This is an old article (January 2013) and is very interesting, but
substantially out of date regarding a story that has developed a lot. The
concept, as indicated in the article, was developed by a KISS (Keck Institute)
study group, which is a fancy way of saying about 30 scientists/technologists
who gathered in a room at Caltech to think up some new mission concepts.

The concept caught some tailwind -- from the _manned_ side of NASA -- and HQ
started talking about it as a possible mission concept that would be a step on
the manned roadmap. Such fast uptake of a mission concept is incredibly rare.

Then the larger asteroid science community took interest, and was somewhat
disgruntled because the concept had not been vetted by the community at large.
Controversy ensued throughout 2013 -- partly centered on selection of an
asteroid -- here is a good summary:
[http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2013/07/nasa-warned-go-
slow...](http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2013/07/nasa-warned-go-slow-
asteroid-capture-project)

The concept is now called the "asteroid initiative" and I think it is also
associated with enhancing NEO detection. The web site is here:
[http://www.nasa.gov/asteroidforum/#.U151pF7fPRo](http://www.nasa.gov/asteroidforum/#.U151pF7fPRo)

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danielweber
_Such work could help develop ways to use asteroid material for construction
or spaceship fuels, making the captured asteroid a stepping stone for human
missions to larger asteroids and eventually to Mars._

This has nothing to do with Mars. NASA's current political climate is to say
that Mars is their goal and everything is a stepping stone towards it, but
this isn't providing any of the key technologies we need for a manned Mars
mission (heavy lift, artificial G, Mars landing craft).

 _EDIT_ : Not that this is without value. But sell it on its own merits.
Saying "we need to mine asteroids to go to Mars" is making it _harder_ to go
to Mars.

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leorocky
I thought artificial gravity was science fiction. Is that seriously being
studied? I'm guessing they just are going to spin some kind of space capsule
ala Space Odyssey 2001? What else would they be doing? Not generating any kind
of artificial gravitational waves with a magical flux capacitor.

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danielweber
Yes, spin the craft. NASA's policy has been to never[1] do it, and instead say
"but we've been studying microgravity for decades!"

We need experience in maneuvering and setting up a spinning craft and also
playing through its failure modes.

[1] They did it exactly once, from my memory, but I forget the details.

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JoeAltmaier
Why go all that way (to the asteroid belt) and back, and stop two doors down?
Bring it into earth orbit! Or is that not politically correct? Because the
risks are indistinguishable.

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ColinWright
My thoughts ...

Having it in Earth orbit is no great challenge - better to have it further out
of the gravity well to be a better staging post, and there's more to be
learned from having to go back and forth to it further out.

Look at the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. Each one was specifically
designed to learn something new that was essential for the Moon landing. This
seems designed for maximum learning and not just for the individual challenge.

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JoeAltmaier
Doing it at all is so near impossible at current technology levels as to be a
pipe dream. To dream of putting further obstacles in our path is pointless.

You want to practice remote mining, do it on the moon, or at the bottom of the
sea, or in a deep-core mineshaft here on earth. All simpler than going to the
asteroid and bringing back gigatons of rock.

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ColinWright

      > We choose to go to the moon in this decade and
      > do the other things, not because they are easy,
      > but because they are hard, ...
    

This won't happen in one step anyway, just as going to the Moon used many
missions, each learning the next thing(s) necessary.

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JoeAltmaier
Hard? Its beyond our current level of civilization. We have projected only
milliwatts to any distance beyond the moon. Moving asteroids proposes sending
maybe terawatts. That's a lot of zeroes. Then propose autonomous robots to
select an asteroid, navigate to it, attach to it, propel it and do course
correction - aiming at good ol mother earth but trying to miss by a hair, with
the biggest projectile mankind has ever launched.

Many other obstacles present themselves, but these two are huge enough.

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keenerd
> Its beyond our current level of civilization. We have projected only
> milliwatts to any distance beyond the moon.

We have a 2kW nuclear reactor rolling around Mars at the moment. 400 watts in
the interstellar neighborhood. 200W currently en route to Pluto.

Maybe you think nuclear is cheating? Solar might make more sense for this
mission anyway, since it is in the Earth-Venus neighborhood. The Rosetta probe
would generate almost 10kW at that distance from the sun.

~~~
arethuza
We've also had fairly small devices (tens of tons) capable of yottawatt (10^24
W) levels of power output - admittedly not for very long....

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Crito
Do you have a source for that? Wikipedia has the largest lasers maxing out in
the pettawats, with only Tzar Bomba crossing over into yottawatts:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)#yot...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_\(power\)#yottawatt_.281024_watts.29)

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arethuza
Yes, large H-bombs were what I meant - would be good to find a constructive
use for them.

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Crito
There are actually many peaceful uses of nuclear weapons, both the US and the
Soviets experimented with using them to dig big holes, and the Soviets also
used them for geographic surveys (like that "thumper" at the beginning of
Jurassic Park, but _much_ bigger ;)) and a few other things. Unfortunately all
of these uses are politically untenable.

It would be great to use them in space though; it would probably be much
easier to convince the public to go for that.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Getting them up there is the risk - a launch failure means raining radioactive
death at random.

~~~
arethuza
Not really - bomb design has come a long way in the last ~70 years - modern
bomb designs are very resilient to damage and very unlikely to detonate
accidentally. And if that isn't good enough then take the parts to orbit
separately and assemble in orbit.

We've had thousands of H-bombs on top of rockets for decades and a number of
live fire tests where bombs delivered by missile detonated and so far there
have been no accidental detonations.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Nothing survives uncontrolled reentry. It isn't detonation that's at issue;
its melted bomb parts falling like rain across large swaths of a continent.

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k-mcgrady
First off I have to admit I know practically nothing about this but wouldn't
there be some very serious risks to doing this (Edit: If it's only 7m across
I'm guessing it wouldn burn up in the Earth's atmosphere so probably poses
limit risk to us in the form of an impact)? If there are it raises some
serious questions about how humanity decides whether or not to allow NASA or
any other space agency to go ahead with such a plan.

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okasaki
The burn would probably (deliberately) be done in such a way that the
asteroid's trajectory would never intersect the earth just in case it failed.

Once it's in orbit around the moon it's not going anywhere.

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danielweber
Things in lunar orbit do degrade and crash into the moon. NASA has put a lot
of stuff into lunar orbit over the years and they all eventually crashed.
There's essentially no atmosphere, but the Moon is not a perfect sphere and
there are mascons that perturb orbits.

It's a question of how high it is, too.

NB: I didn't know this until I asked /r/space about it several years ago.

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user080
Personally I would like to attain some of the gas giants athmosphere(
_Hydrogen_ ).

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danielweber
ITYM Helium-3.

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crapiola
why?

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ColinWright
It can be done by robot, it several new abilities, it acts as a staging post
for deep space missions, it lets NASA examine an asteroid close up and
repeatedly, and it can be mined, again demonstrating abilities needed for deep
space missions and for long-term possibilities for resource acquisition and
management.

Also, why not?

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ddt
I think the second reason you listed to be much more compelling than the
first. It could be argued that the space race was about ensuring that the US
had missile superiority over the USSR, but I'd wager a significant number of
the aeronautical engineers and astronauts involved were much more interested
in going to the moon because it was there.

