NASA Chief Tells the Critics of Exploration Plan: "Get Over It" 216
mknewman (557587) writes "For years, critics have been taking shots at NASA's plans to corral a near-Earth asteroid before moving on to Mars — and now NASA's chief has a message for those critics: 'Get over it, to be blunt.' NASA Administrator Charles Bolden defended the space agency's 20-year timeline for sending astronauts to the Red Planet on Tuesday, during the opening session of this year's Humans 2 Mars Summit at George Washington University in the nation's capital."
Re:How the west wasn't won (Score:2, Interesting)
If you wanted a better fictional story about why it was a bad idea, I might pose the story of a day when intelligent dinosaurs were living in Pangea, and a space agency went to 'get' an asteroid. whether through malfunction or deliberation doesn't matter, because the asteroid crashed into the southern part, and punched obliquely into the mantle right where there was a collection of Uranium-calcium georeactors. It pushed one to the center, causing a massive explosion that blew out the Scotia plate (below) and the Karoo (above), and like a bullet through glass also produced a 950-mile radius ring of Kimberlite dikes in one of the most spectacular explosions ever seen.
Meanwhile, a third of the way around the globe, under what would later become the New England Plume, the shock waves triggered another such explosion, blowing out the Hudson Bay (above) and the Carribean plate (below), and making it's own 850-mi radius ring of kimberlite explosion. (kimberlite explosions are violent enough to launch material into orbit, and bring diamonds up from below).
And on the line between the two explosions, the supercontinent split in two, with the break cutting over just where the two shatter rings intersected. 90% of the sea life died, the ground around both explosions was contaminated with extreme nuclear radioactivity... and the dinosaur civilization died as well.
Of course, that's just fiction. If it weren't there'd be evidence in the georecord. Indeed, our geologists would know to look for diamonds in an 850-mile ring around the Hudson, or on the west coast of Greenland...