NASA selects ‘Option B’ for Asteroid Redirect Mission

spaceflightinsider.com ^ | Collin Skocik

[cripplecreek]

So basically get a small asteroid from the surface of a large asteroid.

[Red_Devil 232]

I am having a problem understanding how this is supposed to work.

[DesertRhino]

And put this new asteroid into orbit round the moon. No, I cant see anything that could go wrong. Lets screw with the moon. Maybe we can have 100 foot tides. Or maybe we can place it wrong, and watch as it whirls off into the earth at mach 1000

[bayliving]

Why not pluck boulders from space and toss them at your enemies? You hurl a big enough rock at a city and you have all of the effects of a high yield nuke without all of that messy radiation to deal with...

[cripplecreek]

Won’t be enough mass to screw with the moon or tides. If it entered the earth’s atmosphere it will be a bright fireball and never reach the surface.

[Moonman62]

This is the equivalent of getting a huge stack of money and setting it on fire.

[Lurker]

Check out the scifi novel “Footfall” for that very scenario.

[keving]

What does Algore suggest?

[Telepathic Intruder]

“Up to four meters in diameter”. More like a meteoroid than an asteroid. It’s less than half the size of the meteor that exploded over Russia in 2013.

[COBOL2Java]

But, did they vet this plan with the Muslims first?

[cpdiii]

Why not pluck boulders from space and toss them at your enemies? You hurl a big enough rock at a city and you have all of the effects of a high yield nuke without all of that messy radiation to deal with.

Actually it would not be that hard to do with a near earth asteroid. You could actually steer a "planet killer" at the earth. If you "push" the asteroid slightly when it is far out in its orbit it would not take a great deal of energy to put it on a trajectory to impact the earth. A 5 kilometer asteroid would do us all in.

[cripplecreek]

Tungsten darts the size of telephone poles fired from the surface of the moon with rail guns would be formidable weapons. Maybe small rockets attached to make minor course adjustments.

We need to achieve the high ground.

[norwaypinesavage]

This sure seem like an awful lot of shoveling for a quite useless hole. So we "tow" s useless rock from one place in space to another, and then "visit" it. What have we gained? We can already determine it's makeup from instruments. Even if it were pure gold, the value would be far less than the cost.

This sure sounds like something Obama dreamed up in one of his adolescent nightmares.

[cripplecreek]

Just yesterday we sent one of the Kelly brothers to space for a year to find out what we already know.

Homer Hickam was complaining about it on twitter yesterday saying we should be looking for ways to overcome the damaging effects of space travel instead of proving what we already know.

I personally think we should be concentrating on living on the moon and using it as the jumping off point for deeper space.

[SunkenCiv]

Option B for "Barry". Thanks BenLurkin.

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[Toddsterpatriot]

Tanstaafl.

[smokingfrog]

Is this Billy Bob's idea?

[Axenolith]

If you punched the moon with a 10 miler at 30 miles a second the worst we’d face is a bunch of pretty diffuse re-entrant ejecta bombarding us. They’re talking about something the size of a basket ball.

[Axenolith]

Damn straight!