NASA Proposes Manned Asteroid Mission

eldavojohn writes "NASA has proposed a manned asteroid mission to a near earth object. They mention this being viewed as a "gap-filler" to keep the public's attention between a lunar exploration & manned mars mission. The article also cites these goals as in line with the Constellation Program. From the article, 'Furthermore, a human venture to a space rock may well accelerate precursor robotic surveys of asteroids, Schweickart observed. "Early unmanned visits to asteroids ... it's the same pattern as we did with the Moon and we're doing right now with Mars. It's all pretty logical," he told SPACE.com.'"

This is important

The experience we get from a mission to asteroids could serve us well in the event that one heads towards earth. I mean, Bruce Willis isn't getting any younger.

So does this mean...

...that when the special edition of Armageddon is released, it'll be marked as "based on a true story?"

Best make sure there's solid ground

If the plan is to "land" on an asteroid and plant a flag (or whatever), it's probably a good idea to actually know ahead of time that there's solid ground there. If I recall correctly, the most recent asteroid fly-bys suggested that it was mostly loose gravel held together by microgravity. Imagine "landing" and finding yourself sinking into a bunch of rocks that start flying about.

Re:Best make sure there's solid ground

Yeah, I sure hope someone at NASA reads your post, otherwise they'll just blast a rocket full of people up there and hope for the best.

Re:

Well, my point is that we don't have a very good understanding of asteroids. Personally I'd rather see a plan that involved a lot of robotic exploration first, with a tentative "later we'll decide if a manned mission makes sense". Doing manned missions f

Re:Best make sure there's solid ground

Doing manned missions for PR purposes seems pretty silly.

You must've missed the whole Mercury - Gemini - Apollo era of NASA. Science aspects aside, it was just a cockfight with Russia.

Nobody wants to see robots in space.

Doing manned missions for PR purposes seems pretty silly.

Not doing PR will guarantee that the entire Space Program ends up being nothing but a bunch of expensive lawn ornaments and a theme park in Florida.

It's only because of the public interest in space, and their willingless to spend a shitload of money on it, that there is the opportunity to conduct scientific research up there at all. Private industry isn't going to pay for it; at least not on anything like the scale that we've come to enjoy today.

The primary goal of the space program should be to ensure its own future existence, and that means keeping the public interested. If that means going and sending some guy up to stand on an asteroid for a photo op next to a flag, so be it. It's that sort of thing which will keep the money flowing.

"Actual scientists" are outvoted.

Nobody but actual scientists, that is, who realize that robotic missions are far more cost-effective and accomplish more than manned ones.

Too bad there aren't enough 'actual scientists' to have much of a vote. That's the pain in the ass of a democracy: it's not just the smart people who get to have a say in running things. If you can't convince the non-scientists of why you need money, you're not going to get it.

The irrational feelings of the masses affect science all the time. Look at stem-cell research; that's a whole field that's basically turned into a proxy battleground for anti-abortion groups. I think a lot of researchers there tried to just stay out of the mud-slinging, but in doing so they basically got run over: it wasn't until after the religious groups got their laws passed that any of the research organizations started doing their own PR. If they had been doing good PR work from the beginning, it might have never become a national issue.

Science doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not something that can just happen on some high academic plane, removed from the ugly realities of the political process. If you want money, you need to make average people -- people, in many cases, with a high school education and a crappy one at that -- understand or at least feel connected to what you're doing. And you need to do it constantly: not just when you've got a problem and need public support. You need to bring the public along from Day 1. I hope that these asteroid missions are NASA finally waking up and realizing that you can't ignore the public on one hand, and expect them to pay for your research on the other. It doesn't work that way.

Re:"Actual scientists" are outvoted.

The "smart people" are often, in hindsight, horrifyingly incorrect. Look into the history of eugenics and phrenology at some point.

won't sink

You won't sink. The gravity's too weak, remember?

Better than Armageddon?

Like NASA can do better than Armageddeon? [yahoo.com]

Maybe if they get Steve Buscemi [yahoo.com] to pilot the mission they have a chance.

A Gap Filler?

It's so great NASA has the right goal: entertaining the masses.

Re:A Gap Filler?

It's so great NASA has the right goal: entertaining the masses.

"The masses" would be the people that pay for what NASA does. I mean, I know I pay a lot of taxes. And the whole purpose of missions like this is to find activities that do benefit their program (more experience in different circumstances) while also stimulating an interest, in the taxpayers, to continuing to fund this stuff. Making sure that some of the testing and learning also happens to be interesting to watch is simply smart. We're a long way from stomping around Mars and looking under rocks, but we can do some very good CEV testing and some other very cool science near one of those interesting big rocks. And it will look great in HD.

Science isn't circus, but politics is.

Interesting, important != understandable to the average person.

Unfortunately, it's those "average people" who control the flow of cash to scientific research, and it's their basically ignorant, baseless opinions which determine what agencies get funded and which get redlined out of existence.

Democracy is sort of a bitch that way. If you can't make your case for funding to the masses, they're going to ignore you; once that happens, the politicians will smell money, and move in for the kill.

Politics is circus. And thus, anything that derives its funding from the political process, or has to otherwise interact with it, needs to get with the program.

Unless you have some brilliant ideas on how to make NASA totally self-funding, it's the "PR stunt" missions that are going to effectively pay for all the boring research ones, that Mr. and Mrs. America don't care about.

Mining?

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the obvious: Using an asteroid landing as a precusror to a mining mission.

If NASA's plans go forward, they're going to need a space infrastructure. Eventually, that will mean space-based manufacturing. For manufacturing, you need raw materials. Those raw materials are expensive to lift from Earth's gravity well. Ergo, the best solution is to mine them from much smaller gravity wells where the cost of transport is comparitively minimal.

The key issue that an mission to an asteroid would need to resolve is the actual composition and concentration of valuable ores. Scientists currently have a lot of educated guesses, but we won't know for sure until a geologist makes a proper survey.

Bad idea in lots of ways

What's the basis for NASA's planning, here?

Science, or entertaining the public to keep the space budget healthy?

What happens when the public start to wonder why exactly we're sending men to the Moon and Mars and asteriods, just to have them come back again? what exactly did we get for it, except the bill? saying "it's for science" or "it's advancing towards men in space" is getting *old*. We don't have an off-planet base, we're not getting one in the next ten or twenty years.

When you consider that reality, statements like "for science" and "men in space" are ring hollow and people basically go "well, I can't see why we're doing this" and then your public support goes away.

And no bad thing if it did. NASA has been an unmitigated disaster for space travel and exploration. It's almost entirely prevented enterprise and investment into the field and substitued expensive, slow, bureaucratic, political-football State-run snails-pace development.

What have we got to show for the last thirty, fourty years of NASA?

We got men on the moon and then...

What?

One exploration satellite every year or two? Skylab for a bit, then that came down and after thirty years, we FINALLY have the ISS...and it's in low Earth orbit. What's the point, exactly? it's a frickin' expensive way to get into space.

Where's the innovation?

State run companies *DO NOT INNOVATE*.

And by God, if there's a field which needs innovation to get off the ground, it's space travel.

We need solutions to fundamental problems. You don't get that from a committee.

Re:Bad idea in lots of ways

"State run companies *DO NOT INNOVATE*.

I love to read such claims on posted the internet. [isoc.org]. Nice high irony factor.

Re:Bad idea in lots of ways

We don't have an off-planet base, we're not getting one in the next ten or twenty years.

So the ISS then is simply on the soundstage wher they faked the moon landings then?

Excellent book on why we should go to asteroids

For all of you slashdot readers who have plenty of time on your hands, here is an excellent book on why going to the asteroids should be one of, if not THE, priorities of the manned space program. Although I haven't read it since I was young(er) I still remember it fondly as being one of my great inspirations for space travel. The ease of getting there (it is energetically easier to get to a Near Earth Orbit asteroid than going to the moon!), the resources available there (iron asteroids = lots of metals, icy asteroids/comets = water and volatiles, carbonaceous = building materials) and the potential for discovery/experience in deep space travel are covered in this fascinating book. It made a compelling case, without resort to more speculative ideas such as orbital habitats a la L-5, for why this is our logical next step after the moon.

Of course the book was written before Luiz Alvarez proposed that asteroids likely were responsible for mass extinctions. However since that justification for travelling to the asteroids has been discussed endlessly I don't think the omission hurts this book.

If you can find this book (I'm sure it's been out of print for decades) and have the time to read it, please do, It will help restore the feeling of endless possibilities that some of us had about space travel when we were young.

"Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids" Donald Cox and Dandridge Cole

By the way, if you've read this far, you might want to check out my previous musings on asteroids - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171538&cid=142 87818 [slashdot.org]

So what?

NASA talks about this and that, shuffles around some papers, maybe changes the names of certain desk jobs, and nothing concrete comes out of it. This has been going on for, oh, a decade now (at least).

Whether we should blame NASA, Congress or the White House for this current situation is moot. Anything NASA says about future manned missions that involve something other than putting people into low-earh orbit in an aging space shuttle is a pipe dream, isn't particularly noteworthy and I fail to see why it belongs on the front page here.

Finally - a step into space?

For 40 years, NASA has been sending astronauts into low Earth orbit and calling it "spaceflight". Dinking around in LEO is not space travel.

OK, there was the Apollo program. That begins to count. But the Apollo astronauts were still, at all times, within the Earth's gravity well (the moon is gravitationally bound to the Earth).

But now ... "That kind of early demonstration mission might last no more than 60 or 90 days," Durda said, "and take the crew no farther than a few lunar distances away from Earth."

Finally. A human being is going to travel in space. Not very far. But it's a start, after decades of pitiful pretence.

Not an asteroid!

Capturing an asteroid for resources would be idiotic. Placing a spacecraft hull in orbit is simple. Tie together a few TransHab modules, and there you go. It is a one time cost. The real problem is consumables: Water, oxygen, propellant. You won't find usable quantities of these things on an asteroid.

No, what you want to do is capture a comet. Thousands, if not millions of tonnes of water, which can be cracked for oxygen. Also, plenty of other ices which can be used as propellant. Launch a giant plastic bag into an intercept orbit, seal the comet inside. As the sun heats the bag/comet, vent the gas to put the comet into a more usable orbit, and voila, a mountain sized chunk of water to live off of.

Re:Not an asteroid!

Actually, it's only a few consumables that you'd be short of in an asteroid: hydrogen and carbon, in particular. Oxygen is abundant in most lunar and asteroid regolith. Furthermore, there's a slight difference of scale between a billion-ton asteroid and a "few TransHab modules strapped together". At current rates, launching a billion tons into LEO would cost about $10 quadrillion. While this may be a "one-time cost", it's a wee bit of steep one.

However, you're certainly right that capturing a comet would be extremely useful. And I love the plastic bag method of propulsion! Has anyone studied this for practicality?

Re:Been there, done that

The Moon is too far away and has too deep a gravity well to be really useful as a source of raw materials. An asteroid that we could break up and use to build really big spacecraft, satellites and space stations could kick start the commercial space business into high gear.

Re:move that sucker into orbit

Power is anything but cheap, especially in space.

A decent ion engine, such as the one which powered Deep Space 1, required most of the spacecraft's 2.4 kW of power, and that was to get a 500kg craft around.

Ion drive thrust increases with power input. So, in order to move an asteroid about within our lifetimes you're probably going to need several football fields of panels, not to mention either a large number of actual engines, or a new breed of them. (And try getting all that to the asteroid in the first place).

The whole benefit of ion engines is that you require less fuel on your spacecraft due to higher isp. If you can figure out how to use materials on the asteroid for chemical rockets, do it.. if you don't, you're still going to be pushing that mass with an ion engine anyway.