NASA Insiders Propose Stepping Stone Path to Deep Space

No, this one isn’t a thermonuclear war, or the set of military events prophesied prior to the appearance or reappearance of the Messiah, but a more banal reference to the Bruce Willis movie that featured a space mission to land on an asteroid & destroy it.

Other than being a showcase of some hideously erroneous physics, the one thing from the movie that is being seriously proposed is a manned landing on an “earth crossing” asteroid to take place sometime between the currently planned goals of returning to the moon, and then later going to Mars.

…there’s ongoing discussion of mounting a piloted mission to an asteroid – a voyage by astronauts to a near-Earth object, termed NEO for short. These proponents feel certain of the scientific payoff from reaching, first-hand, an asteroid – perhaps even becoming able to exploit these chunks of celestial flotsam to further humankind’s plunge into the cosmos. Space technologists argue that a NEO trip could be a valuable shakeout of people, equipment, and procedures prior to hurling astronauts beyond the Moon to the distant dunes of Mars.

For others, NEOs are viewed as downright dangerous, in terms of a head-on collision between Earth and a space rock. It’s best to get to know these incoming beasts ahead of time.

This would be a sort of neat project…and would have some real scientific merit on its own well beyond that of another robotic mission.