NASA Budget Priority: Asteroid Defense, Wall Street Journal
“Once again, NASA likely faces a stiff fight over its desire to ramp up funding to $820 million annually to help subsidize work on private taxis to transport astronauts to the orbiting space station. Congress has kept a lid on such appropriations at around $500 million. While seeking to increase investment in cutting-edge spacecraft propulsion and on-orbit refueling, NASA would lose nearly one-third of its current funding to foster interest and education in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. The proposed cuts are part of a governmentwide bid by the White House to consolidate so-called STEM education in three other agencies.”
NASA mulls asteroid capture mission, eventual manned visits, CBS
“I hope it goes forward,” said Rusty Schweickart, a former Apollo astronaut who helped found the B612 Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to building and launching a privately funded space telescope to search for threatening asteroids. “Asteroids are a very, very interesting area,” he told CBS News in a telephone interview. “They’re a hell of a resource, and I think the potential for long-term resource development for use in space is going to be a very big thing. And this is sort of step one. It’s a baby step in a way, but it should be very interesting.”

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member...

7 replies on “Asteroids and Budgets”

  2. The WSJ is being a little disingenuous when it suggests the administration wants to “subsidize space taxis”. We are doing that now with Soyuz. What the CC program wants to do is advance US technology to be capable of competing in the market. The first step in “asteroid defense” would be to thoroughly map the asteroids.

  3. I did a search of news articles and wow, lotsa articles about this asteroid retrieval concept. Whatever situation that might happen in future, I’d like to actually see something built and something that goes someplace. Makes sense to me, NASA spends time and money on technology including building “asteroid operations” experience. It is high risk and it all may end up going nowhere. But some initial effort needs to be done. Maybe some people who got rich in a unrelated business decide to spend their extra billion on getting an asteroid that contains precious metals to start a new business. They can review NASA reports and hire ex-employees from the Office of Extraterrestrial Materials for their new company.

    Pete Worden said we will not send Bruce Willis but robots made by those like the students that participated in First Robotics competition in San Jose last week.

    1. Yeah, there seems to be more hate in the space community than in the general community. The sort of people who like the space program will enjoy an asteroid mission as much as they enjoyed Curiosity’s 7-minutes-of-terror. (The sort of people who hate NASA will hate it.)

  4. We choose to go to the moon. 1962
    We choose to give the Moon a Moon. 2013

    …and then use that material for radiation shielding to build a real interplanetary spaceship that can make it to Mars with the same propulsion technology that we used to get it there in the first place.

    Apollo was learning how to leave the planet.   This mission is about building the infrastructure for a space faring nation that can go to the Moon and Mars…  and mine friggin asteroids and build interplanetary spacecraft in space.

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