Schweickart to Nelson: [we] Are on a Dead End Road

Hear, hear.. Well said. We can't know what the future holds
even if our Presidents plan were passed as written. Tell me
how we are going to cut the budget? Tell me how future
congress persons will regard NASA? That said our Presidents
plan is an outline for the possibility of a rich new life
for human space exploration. The Constellation/Shuttle
programs were going nowhere expensively. They surely would
have lost congressional support at some point. And would
have got us nowhere beyond LEO, and eventually not even
that. Time to say good by and work hard for a new direction
in space. A program of steady successes. Building public
understanding, involvement, and excitement.

Nelson and Shelby efforts amount to saving existing jobs and not saving the integrity and future course for NASA manned exploration. The politicians don't give a damn about the path NASA takes. What they are creating for NASA, its future, is a Jobs Program.

Leave it to the politicians and old NASA astronauts and you will see another very expensive program in terms of dollars, time and possibly human lives. Specifically Armstrong and Cernan who have had little input into NASA's path until now they suddenly start jib-jabbing as if they can ride a white horse and save it.

Obama's team needs to keep Mars as a goal in order to structure the development program to create the technologies it will require. But this does not mean we return to Ares I & V and an overweight Orion for trips to the Moon. We need to be forward looking and realize that new technology will change a manned mission profile such as reducing mission duration to a year rather than three. Focus on technologies, build a heavy lift vehicle (Ares V class) but without a set launch date for Mars. As the fruits of these R&D programs mature, trips to asteroid, L1 points, Lunar flybys, will be practical.

The Moon is not a practical destination and we've proven we can do it. Landing humans on Mars is an extreme challenge primarily because of the lack of atmosphere for slowing down heavy payloads, requiring instead a gliding vehicle. Overall the R&D for Mars Mission will also have to wait until there is better international cooperation to spread the cost.

Wow, that's interesting.

I agree that the shuttle was getting us no where except LEO.

Constellation was going to LEO, Moon, and Mars; had actual rocket designs, rocket tests, capsule designs and tests, parachute tests. You know, actual destinations and hardware and goals.

Obamaspace has no hardware, no dates, no rockets, no clear plan, some study about heavy lift r&d. If you could just point me to the place in the budget with something similar to the word "launch" beyond the ISS that would be great. Oh wait, there's not anything remotely close to actually launching anything is there? Hmmm, Now that's a path to how do you say it? Nowhere

Like Congress said last week, Nasa's budget is pretty much flatline so it would be great if they could tell us when they are going to launch "something" (who knows what it will be since they don't have a clue) which pot of money will it come from out of the 2011 budget? Will they end the heavy lift R&D program, take it from Earth or Planetary sciences? It will have to come from somewhere ya know...

Because currently there is NO MONEY to launch anything other than to ISS. So, please let us know how that is funded or when it will be funded (if ever).

"Technical arguments can and have been made to support this intermediate step, and they are not without justification and support. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the arguments for necessity are fundamentally weak, and in any event are overwhelmed by the widely held and devastating question "been there; done that... tell us why you're doing that again?" Why, after 60 years, should we be devoting incredible resources and effort to going back to the Moon instead of to a challenging, pioneering new goal? As Norm Augustine stated in your 12 May hearing, the long term space program has to be supported on a continuing basis by the public, and the public simply will not maintain support to reliably sustain a monumental and expensive effort to do again what we did 60 years before. This is especially true of young people, who are hardly inspired by a goal of repeating their grandparent's achievements."

stupid, stupid, stupid. In other words, we will not go back to the moon because we have left a few footprints there already. This is like saying Europeans should not have explored North America once they had landed on its shores and combed a few beaches.

Instead of building a capability, we will engage in various stunts in the hope of "garnering wide public support". Can you build a base on an asteroid? No. Go to the moon. Build the base and public interest will follow. Don't look to your children for guidance. You are supposed to be the leaders, the adults - act like it.

Obama did not create Mars has a destination, merely orbiting it in a distant future with an unknown architecture, plan, and funding. The benefits of orbiting, namely real-time communications, are marginal at best given the successes of robotic missions. Lagrangian points are even worse in their scientific value. The Moon is a logical stepping stone for prolonged human space exploration, not to mention science and exploitation of resources. I am convinced that man will be back on the Moon before the same agency takes the challenge of Mars, even if that happens hundreds of years from now. It is crazy to think of landing on Mars without first using the Moon to learn from it, it won't happen.

The sad truth is that the Obama vision produces nothing but paper studies and dooms human space exploration beyond LEO. Perhaps it is the right decision, an strong argument can be made that human space exploration beyond LEO is too costly and with marginal benefits compared to robotic missions. I can buy that. What I cannot buy is the idea that the Obama vision supports human space exploration when there is nothing of substance with regards to funding, concrete milestones and plans. The Obama vision seems more like the road to nowhere than a program that could be testing rockets next year.

I agree with Russell Schweickart

Obama doesn't want to send anyone anywhere anytime soon. During his administration NASA will fly far less astronauts, fly a tiny few of them on Russian rockets to ISS, and have NO building block steps towards a greater BEO goal.

Asteroids? In what vehicle?
With what rocket?
Oh, in five years we will decide what kind of rockets? oh.

In what vehicle? Oh, we aren't going to design that now and throw out what could have done the job. Oh.

That is more then a dead end, that is a fatal plan. And without strong congressional support, his plan is going to be doomed anyways.

Rusty, your tragically and terribly wrong.
You should listen to Cernan, Schmitt, Armstrong, Kranz, Craft, etc etc etc.

So how can you be for space depots and not want to return to the Moon since the cheapest sources for both oxygen and hydrogen for space depots in cislunar space-- is on the lunar surface?

How can you be for private manned commercial spaceflight which is mostly going to be dependent on space tourism-- not NASA contracts-- and say that we don't need to return to the Moon which is only a few days away and is the most preferred destination for space tourist!

How can you be for going to Mars without providing astronauts with the hundreds of tonnes of mass shielding needed to protect their bodies and their brains from the deleterious effects of galactic radiation. Hydrogen is the most effective material for mass shielding and the cheapest source of this material in cis lunar space appears to be at the lunar poles.

And how can you call the Obama plan a good one, Mr. Schweikart, since it would allow NASA to spend nearly $500 billion of the tax payer's money over the next 25 years yet it doesn't even get us to the surface of the Moon or Mars?

Cernan is right, Obama's plan is an extremely expensive 'mission to nowhere'! And it is clearly politically unsustainable as far as Congress is concerned.

Marcel F. Williams

I also rise in support of Russell's viewpoint. Looking back from a thousand years in the future, our descendants, who could conceivably then be Martians, might have found that there were really only two major justifications for human activity in space. The first is development of capability to avoid highly destructive and even extinction-level impacts on Earth by asteroids and comets. The second assumes failure on the first and requires progress towards human exploration and eventual habitation of Mars, the only other accessible and potentially habitable planet with evidently huge resources of water. It really is that simple, the survival of life. In comparison, the Moon can be at most a desolate outpost, certainly of great value for science, and arguably a stepping stone to Mars, but not the destination of our salvation. The most significant step we have made since Apollo is sustained human presence on ISS, the path to asteroids and eventually to Mars further requires mastery of long-duration human journeys in deep space. This should be the new goal of the NASA program.

"stupid, stupid, stupid. In other words, we will not go back to the moon because we have left a few footprints there already."

No we (humans) are not going back there because the Moon can be explored more EFFICIENTLY using rovers like Lunokhod. We do not need a pointless base that will suck Dollars like the POR!
The International partners are not interested either. So if America were to go it alone, America would have to cough up the Cash.
In thirty or forty years when a minimalistic base was finally being occupied the American public would be saying that their HSF was just going "backwards and forwards".

Flexible Path is an ever expanding spiral.

"Can you build a base on an asteroid? No."
Clarke's First old chap!
Phobos? Ceres??

"This is like saying Europeans should not have explored North America once they had landed on its shores and combed a few beaches."

No this is like the Europeans landing on a desert island to discover that its resources did not meet up with requirements of setting up a viable colony.
The next island may be less of a desert however our ships can't get there yet; so we are building the technology to build a better ship that will not only get us to the next island but all the Islands in the Pacific!

"Build the base and public interest will follow."
How much interest is there in Amundsen-Scott Base? If only a few select mega rich tourists scientists and astronauts get to visit: public apathy may be something to hope for.
I predict a riot!

Under the POR, indeed under any sensibly funded Program your children *will* be the explorers!
Alas there are a lot of children around howling their heads off because the 'adults' won't let them have the latest shiny new toy as advertised on NASATV. The current generation of children will just have to make do and mend until the "Financial Black Hole" and "Ecological Perfect Storm" run their respective courses.
But as Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords stated there is a Third Way.

Schweickart's letter is well-reasoned, and I agree with it completely.

newpapyrus: Like many others, you're mistaking the fact that the Moon won't be the very first BEO destination in the new plan with some sort of decree that no future US missions will ever go there. Just look at the projects which are planned under FY2011, such as a 2015 lunar ISRU mission, and it's pretty clear that the mining of lunar resources is a pretty important part of the new plans:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=34056

The President's own words:

"Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before."

Sometimes you have to believe that a man is actually serious about what he's saying!

Marcel F. Williams

""This is especially true of young people, who are hardly inspired by a goal of repeating their grandparent's achievements."

stupid, stupid, stupid."
I don't know about stupid, but certainly wrong. At least judging by the flood of resumes we got from college kids when my company was working the CEV proposal, today's young folks would love to work on a moon landing mission. Would they also like to work on a Mars mission or building the Enterprise? Of course, but the "ho-hum, been there, done that" attitude towards a lunar mission is certainly not universal to all young people as I seem to read here all the time.

newpapyrus: you raise the certainly valid concern of risk to astronaut health from cosmic ray irradiation, but it is unlikely that lunar materials could contribute to mass shielding for the initial human flights to Mars, if these are to occur in the next quarter-century or so. The equipment needed to excavate and process such material, and the rocket propulsion systems needed to lift it off the lunar surface to some assembly point for the Mars spacecraft, would cost far more in mass than the shielding material itself. Expect that any shielding material would be lifted direct to an assembly point in Earth orbit, or perhaps at a Lagrangian point, by a series of HLV launches. Secondly, shielding thickness to a few meters equivalent of water only increases the dosage from secondary products of cosmic ray interactions in the shielding, so strong protection, e.g. equivalent to that afforded by the Earth's atmosphere, requires huge masses. It is more likely for exploratory missions to Mars that the astronauts will simply accept the same approximate risk that thousands of cancer patients experience every day as a side effect on healthy tissue in undergoing radiation treatments, no more than ten percent and hopefully less (needs more research) for complications from the equivalent Mars roundtrip dosage of 120 rems. In consideration of their origins from the military test pilot community, the Apollo astronauts would have considered these very good odds. If I were given a choice, I would certainly opt for Mars over the equivalent for medical treatment.

So how can you be for space depots and not want to return to the Moon since the cheapest sources for both oxygen and hydrogen for space depots in cislunar space-- is on the lunar surface?

Mr. Williams, I'm familiar with most economic analyses dealing with space resources. I'm unfamiliar with any analysis that shows an economically sustainable business space closes using resources exported from the moon - as long as rockets remain the source of transportation. The gravity well to and from the lunar surface is, well, a drag; not to mention the likelihood of a greater potential range of resources from the right collection of NEOs.

Conversely, business cases can be made to close using existing technology rockets (eg, solar electric thrusters) to certain NEOs (near-earth objects), transferring material back to a rotating artificial g environment at a libration point, or even to lower Earth orbit.

While I don't discount lunar space elevators, or mass launchers (and catchers), I think they pre-suppose an entire additional level of development that should not be assumed, in my personal opinion.

Hmmm. "on a dead end road". Why does that sound so familiar...?

http://selenianboondocks.com/2005/12/were-on-a-road-to-nowhere/

@Dave

If you have a space depot at L1 your delta-v requirement to place an oxygen or hydrogen depot their from Earth is approximately 13 km/s. But transporting these resources from the Moon (polar base using a reusable LOX/LH2 Altair) requires only 2.5 km/s of delta-v. An additional 2.5 km/s would be required for the Altair to return to the Moon but fuel requirements would be less since it would return to the lunar surface with no payload.

A reusable ACES LOX/LH2 OTV could also transport oxygen and hydrogen deposited at L1 to LEO for an additional 1 km/s using aerobreaking which would still be cheaper than launching hydrogen and oxygen from Earth using an expendable booster.

Of course, if a more elaborate lunar facility began to use lunar catapults, cannons, or mass drivers to deliver lunar regolith into orbit then that would be an even cheaper source of oxygen.

Marcel F. Williams

Rusty Schweickart was an Apollo astronaut, and the first ever pilot of a lunar module during the Apollo 9 mission. The following is Part One AND two of an oral history interview conducted with Schweickart in 1999 and 2000 for NASA’s Johnson Space Center History Collection.

http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2010/04/25/HP/A/32085/AHTV+Rusty+Schweickart+Oral+History+Interview+Part+2.aspx

http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2010/04/25/HP/A/32074/AHTV+Rusty+Schweickart+Oral+History+Interview+Part+2.aspx

Aerin an Cessna Driver the crying babies of CxP keep crying. Rusty is a Scientist and Pilot astronaut not a plain old jet jockey of 1961. He know what he is talking about. Thank you Rusty!

I have great respect for Astronaut Schweickart's achievements but, in this case, I must disagree with his conclusions. Sadly, it is President Obama's proposal that truly constitutes the road to no-where. It cancels the only actual exploration architecture on the table and effectively tosses out all the research and development accomplished over the last four years in pursuit of the goal of human space exploration like so much trash. It disposes of the Moon as the next goal with what will almost certainly go down in history as the dumbest thing President Obama has said, “Been there. Done that.” All I can say is thank God the Spanish Monarch’s didn’t make such an idiotic statement when Columbus proposed a return journey to the New World. Mr. Obama’s words were doubly discouraging coming from a man who, in different contexts, displays such obvious intellectual capacity.

The President’s plan provides no substitute architecture or meaningful/achievable goal. While we would all like to go to Mars someday, the skills and technologies we needed to get there – and beyond – don’t exist yet and the plans to build them would be unceremoniously tossed out with the trash. Human missions to Lagrange points or asteroids? Even assuming this had sufficient merit to become the primary goal of human space exploration, how are astronauts going to get there? All the equipment that could make such journeys possible will have been zeroed out. Even the Orion capsule essentially will have to be redone from scratch and will be suitable only for lifeboat duty -- certainly not exploration.

The core of the President’s plan is a just a collection of “glittering generalities” – distractions really -- allusions to development of technologies that, while nice to have, in no way constitute a coherent plan to advance human exploration or even set a defined series of steps leading toward that goal. Let it also be said at this point that these technologies would/should be developed in the normal course of the maturation of the Constellation program to permit more flexible alternatives as the program expanded. There was nothing in the Constellation program that precluded research and development of orbital refueling depots, or space based nuclear power, advanced drives like VASIMR, and numerous other important areas of research.

Overall goals and objectives described by the President have been placed safely in the far future – well beyond any need for the President to actually appropriate money to achieve. Even the decision for the choice of design for a heavy lift booster has been placed in what would be the next to last year of a possible second Obama Presidential term – something easy to postpone should we ever get to that point. For all the fervor devotees of "Direct" and other booster alternatives, their energetic opposition to Constellation has been cynically used by opponents of human spaceflight to permit them to gut the program with no alternative either sought or desired.

The idea inherent in the President’s plan that the commercial competitive market would – on its own initiative and largely on its own dime -- design and build better and cheaper specialty spacecraft more rapidly than our current program, is ludicrous on its face. Kool-Aid anyone? Commercially available interplanetary vehicles? Sure, let’s just stroll on down to the local dealership and pick out a good one. I am sure they will give us a terrific deal. Two doors, four doors or perhaps a SUV version? V-6, V-8 or perhaps a hybrid? All we have to do now is pick out the color (I am partial to red) and decide if we want the ceiling mounted DVD player and the surround sound system.

Tragically, the real agenda of the people who developed the President’s plan is to kill human spaceflight beyond low earth orbit. The effect of the plan on human spaceflight at NASA would be to convert it into nothing more than a jobs program that can be easily trimmed, restructured and eventually eliminated.

@Comos Mariner

I'm not as concerned with the cancer risk, at least for men, as I am concerned about the possibility of some brain damage caused by the heavy nuclei in interplanetary space over several months of travel. You're going to need at least 5 meters of mass shielding to stop that. And, of course, hydrogen is the lightest mass shielding material. Using hydrogen for shielding instead of water could reduce mass shielding requirements by 50 to 70%.

If you have a lunar base at the poles, I would assume that they would be utilizing the nearby ice resources within the craters permanently in shadow. A reusable Altair could probably deliver about 20 tonnes to L1 per flight. A heavy lift vehicle from Earth could probably deliver about 40 tonnes of hydrogen to L1 per launch (but this would be a lot more expensive than getting it from the Moon). Since I'd use light sails to get to Mars in the first place, I'd probably have some hydrogen also being manufactured from imported asteroid material (~20 tonnes of hydrogen per 1000 tonnes of asteroid material imported).

But my primary source of hydrogen would be from the Moon. And I assume mass shielding is going to require about 500 to 1000 tonnes of liquid or slush hydrogen delivered to L1.

Marcel F. Williams

You have to follow the money. Schweikart has been pushing the B612 foundation to intercept and modify the course of a NEO for a long time. Obama's mention of NEO's must have been a shot in the arm.

I happen to agree that this is a worthy goal, but can we really believe advice is objective from someone who stands to personally benefit?

With what I believe to be the coming loss of US leadership in human space exploration in mind,

one wishes the anti obama forces would get their song straight...some of the forces say we have already lost US leadership in Space, some say we are going to lose it...

and all this is based on canceling a program that was accomplishing nothing with no other nation in the world trying to go to the Moon!

At least decide if we have lost the leadership or are losing it...LOL

Robert G. Oler

Thank you for reaffirming my point. You are familiar with what the word "first" means, I assume?

I'm familiar with most economic analyses dealing with space resources. I'm unfamiliar with any analysis that shows an economically sustainable business space closes using resources exported from the moon - as long as rockets remain the source of transportation.

Have a look at this study:

Cost/Benefit Modeling of ISRU

This was some work by the Colorado School of Mines in 2003 and funded by DARPA. The study concluded that the economic case for lunar propellant manufacture and export to cislunar closes with lunar ice concentrations of 2 weight percent or greater. New data from Chandrayaan, LCROSS, and LRO support concentrations greater than an order of magnitude higher than that level.

Thank you for that link: "mene mene tekel upharsin!"
Whilst a Moonbase following on from the '60 and '70's would have been the obvious next step... thank goodness that we didn't go on that road. Imagine sitting there, in say: Clavius; only to find that the poles were the vast reservoirs (well a Lake Windermere) of water that they were.
This is why this space cadet approves so highly of the new plan. It does not abandon HSF, nor the Moon and now includes the NEO's within our 'economic sphere.' And 1999 AO10 is at least a body of sufficient size to enable a 'BootsnFlags' moment. Furthermore whilst the commercial exploitation of the Moon has legal consequences. The vast numbers of asteroids, I maintain, do not.

Plenty to go round.

Not only a wide diversity of resource type but also a wide diversity of resource size! Some can become the basis of a Deep Space Habitat/Vessel: 1620 Geographos springs to mind. Some have a historic import: Eros and those lesser bodies with no formal name can either be processed in situ or brought back for processing. And at each instance the threat from a ELE DinoKiller is reduced!

In future years the decision to go for the "Vermin of the Skies" rather than back to the Moon will be seen as a masterstroke not only for American leadership in space but also for Humanity.
Assuming of course that a blinkered perspective doesn't kill the program.

We should decide on future space activity based on scientific or practical reasons for doing something, not on its novelty or stunt value, or on its immediate job security benefits.

Maybe Obama has information that suggests mining asteroids and comets is more promising than mining Luna, so we may be on track there.

However, I think we also need a versatile cis-lunar space truck for some real work we should be doing, such as construction of complex satellites, de-orbiting of large space-debris sources, and possible NEO-response. NEO-response probably couldn't wait for the luxury of fully automated assembly.

And for all we know now, NEO-response may involve the Moon, as a resource or vantage point.

IMHO, the Obama Space Vision is incomplete.

I think the commercial path will lead us to a much worse situation.

We lack one of two things. Either a highly paying activity (that can afford $10k per pound launches) or a much cheaper spaceflight alternative.

What commercial intends to deliver are yesterdays rockets at competitive prices. Great if you have a defined activity, not so great if your main mission is still exploration in search of a profitable business.

If these new developers cant find a way to be richly rewarded for fleshing out entirely new and untested ways of getting to orbit (read: going uphill on a tiny fraction of the normal price) then I wouldn't expect much of a price drop or any major discoveries.
There's no money in taking that much risk, and the hardware they have isn't tuned for the missions we want to see.

Its kinda like trading in the X plane program for tickets on Delta, then expecting them to build a new generation SST's or flying wings...

Why does this need to be binary? If Constellation wasn't going to work, then President Obama's Plan will.

The way I see it, BOTH plans are dead ends. Yes, Constellation would be inching us along and keep some capabilities. But it was always underwhelming.

President Obama's plan is no better, as well, it is NOT a plan. It's merely a rehashing of Von Braun's various visions for tomorrow. Notice the loose timeframe for all of the President's goals, at least a decade down the road. It's just a plan to kick the can down the road, putting it into the next President's lap. President Obama has recognized that the current plan isn't that spiffy.

Schweickart falls into the trap by noting that Constellation wasn't that good of a plan, therefore the President's one is the ONLY alternative. Not noting that the President's plan is hollow.

Well, they didn't call him the "hippy astronaut" for nothing I guess.

Sometimes I wonder what it is that the Obama plan supportors are smoking though.

Grand promises of HSF BEO with no BEO vehicle program does tend to make one wonder.

When you see Bolden in Israel saying that maybe someday there may not even be a need for NASA astronauts anymore then I think the Obama administration's philosophy is clear. They don't think NASA should have a manned spaceflight program.

They believe that NASA is a flawed and wasteful agency that should really get out of the manned spaceflight business altogether. That's why they want private industry to have manned spaceflight capability.

So if private industry wants to go to the Moon or Mars, then they're free to go-- on their own dime! And if private industry doesn't want to go to the Moon or Mars on their own dime then there was no reason to go to those places in the first place! Its pretty much turning over the New Frontier to private industry-- if they want it.

Its almost like Jefferson saying that private companies should make the Louisiana purchase-- not the Federal government.

Marcel F. Williams

> therefore the President's one is the ONLY alternative

You think he said that? You're wrong.

He said "focus on the considered and thoughtful analysis of the panel of experts who dealt explicitly with this, the Augustine Committee" which "rated their 'flexible path' option, 5b, very highly. The Obama administration and NASA leadership ultimately decided on a program very similar to and based on the Augustine Committee's option 5b."

Do you understand now? "Norm and his panel are very experienced and highly qualified academics, business leaders, astronauts, and space program executives." Do you get it? There is no group more qualified. You're on the losing team if you disagree with them.

The Augustine commission failed to examine all options, we all know there are some good ideas out there left out in the cold, and they produced recommendations based upon continued enemic budgets for NASA HSF.
Obama of course helped create that situation himself. Why would we be surprised most of the options suck and are not worthy of a nation born of the frontiers?

Please read. Schweickart goes through and gives his evidence of why Constellation was poor stuff. Then HE states "The alternative to this is support for the President's proposed plan." The alternative. Not AN alternative.

The issue that I have with the proposed direction is that it reads like a Von Braun Disney-esque Tomorrowland. Where some mythical 'one day' we'll do some really neat stuff as soon as we get around to it.

My stated issue was that people want to see this as black and white, that it's Constellation vs. The Administration's plans. There are folks in both camps, and each camp depicts the other as the path to nowhere.

Seems to me that BOTH plans are dead ends. I like the concepts of the Flexible Path suggested by the Austine commission, but I don't see how the Administration's implementation or interpretation of that plan is clear, funded, or followed. It just seems like a vague pie in the sky adaptation and deferral.

Yeah, I get it.

""Norm and his panel are very experienced and highly qualified academics, business leaders, astronauts, and space program executives." Do you get it? There is no group more qualified."

Academics and executives are the last people I would ask to make decisions on space program direction. They lack engineering judgement.

So that's the rallying cry? "Go for the Vermin of the Skies"? How uplifting. Flexible Path is a spiral alright, down the drain.

It would be "nice" if Rusty Schweickart stated in his letter to Senator Nelson that he is a cofounder of the B612 Foundation. The B612 Foundation is a group that is interested in developing methods to stop an asteroid or asteroids from hitting our Earth. Therefore a manned mission to an asteriod would be of great interest to his organization.
Just by chance, perhaps, President Obama space plans is to have a manned mission to an asteroid. So why wouldn't Schweickart support the Presidents plans?

Nice riposte but I never said it was a rallying cry. However it could be! Firstly used in the context of PHAs and the need to characterise and neutralise the threat. Secondly used in a legal sense when debating their inclusion as "Celestial Bodies." So I'll own that for sure.

"...down the drain." Ha Ha very good. Although I would have been tempted to go for the perjorative: "toilet!"
Alas what you are describing is a vortex not a spiral:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect#Draining_in_bathtubs_and_toilets

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio#Relationship_to_Fibonacci_sequence

I note, Aerin, that you fail to refute any of my hyperbole.
A final link for you to ponder:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18616-dark-dangerous-asteroids-found-lurking-near-earth.html