MIT Professor Advocates Ending Asteroid Redirect Mission To Fund Asteroid Survey 116
MarkWhittington writes Professor Richard Binzel published a commentary in the journal Nature that called for two things. He proposed that NASA cancel the Asteroid Redirect Mission currently planned for the early 2020s. Instead, he would like the asteroid survey mandated by the George E. Brown, Jr. Near-Earth Object Survey Act of 2005, part of the 2005 NASA Authorization Act, funded at $200 million a year. Currently NASA funds the survey at $20 million a year, considered inadequate to complete the identification of 90 percent of hazardous near-Earth objects 140 meters or greater by 2020 as mandated by the law.
But where are the potentional profits? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no profit to be made on determining which asteroids may or may not kill us all. There IS profit to be made on mining asteroids.
It's hard to get an idea pushed forward if you can't show people the money.
Re:But where are the potentional profits? (Score:5, Interesting)
"There IS profit to be made on mining asteroids."
That's absolutely ludicrous. Go find out the spot price for mineral ore that's available by the tons right here on Earth.
Tell me how you intend to make a *profit* by going into space with massive amounts of technology and resources???
To get the same things we already have here?
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From February 2013:
"The 150-foot-wide (45 meters) asteroid 2012 DA14 — which will zoom within 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometers) of Earth on Friday, marking the closest approach by such a large space rock that astronomers have ever known about in advance — may harbor $65 billion of recoverable water and $130 billion in metals, say officials with celestial mining firm Deep Space Industries."
http://www.space.com/19758-asteroid-worth-billions-2012-da14-flyby.html
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may harbor $65 billion of recoverable water....
Man, that asteroid water must be quite valuable. I guess they plan to bottle it.
Re:But where are the potentional profits? (Score:5, Informative)
Water on Earth is cheap and plentiful
Water in Earth orbit on the other hand is neither.
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It doesn't matter whether the water is pure or not. It can be electrolyzed into H2 & O2 using solar power.
(eventually) Free air & rocket fuel, anyone?
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Water on Earth is cheap and plentiful
Water in Earth orbit on the other hand is neither.
Water on on earth is needed, and in large quantities. Water in orbit is currently only being used by a few nations' vanity projects.
If you want to justify space exploration on economics, then you must accept that economics will set the schedule.
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Water is one of a large class of substances that we would like to find in space for local use, rather than to send back. Any mining materials return operation will want to minimize human presence, but for maintainability that presence cannot be zero. Hence the need for life-maintaining consumables.
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Water is one of a large class of substances that we would like to find in space for local use, rather than to send back. Any mining materials return operation will want to minimize human presence, but for maintainability that presence cannot be zero. Hence the need for life-maintaining consumables.
I think you have missed the point of my second paragraph, "If you want to justify space exploration on economics, then you must accept that economics will set the schedule." In economic arguments, you cannot simply treat imagined future needs as if they were actual current needs.
A lot of space boosterism displays confusion over the proper use of the present and future tenses.
Re:But where are the potentional profits? (Score:4, Funny)
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may harbor $65 billion of recoverable water....
Man, that asteroid water must be quite valuable. I guess they plan to bottle it.
Key word there being MAY. How much is going to cost to get it and bring it back? Might as well build a load of desalination plants, take water from the ocean, make it useable and do something about increasing water levels. Two birds, one stone.
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Water can be separated into hydrogen and oxygen (read: rocket fuel and oxidizer) with nothing more than electricity. Coincidentally, electricity is the only resource currently available in Earth orbit. Consequently, asteroid water can easily be turned into fuel in orbit. This is fantastic because having fuel in orbit means we don't need to launch as much from Earth. This is doubly fantastic because the overwhelming majority of a rocket's mass is...
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Bring it back? Why the fuck would you be bringing it back? Water can be separated into hydrogen and oxygen (read: rocket fuel and oxidizer) with nothing more than electricity. Coincidentally, electricity is the only resource currently available in Earth orbit. Consequently, asteroid water can easily be turned into fuel in orbit. This is fantastic because having fuel in orbit means we don't need to launch as much from Earth. This is doubly fantastic because the overwhelming majority of a rocket's mass is... fuel. But you're over here talking about water levels on Earth. Slashdot got real dumb.
What else would you do with it? What the fuck good is it space? Right, so you can use some of what you mined to make fuel saving on a cost but who are you going to sell all the rest of this stuff to? What about all the minerals mined? You just going to use them to build houses in space? What good reason is there for mining stuff in space and leaving it space where it's useless to pretty much anyone on earth.
It's not like all the stuff mined on earth just gets left where it is. It all needs processing. Ok
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What else would you do with it?
Why would you need to do anything else with it? Is being able to undercut the current prices for fuel by several orders of magnitude not enough? You haven't really set forth a convincing argument (or any argument, for that matter) regarding why cheap fuel is insufficient as a motivator. I'll answer your question anyway: you could use it as drinking water for astronauts, or you could use it as shielding against radiation.
What the fuck good is it space?
Fuel is good for moving things around. Water and shielding are good for keeping astronau
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It must suck to be you. I've actually done cool work with NASA specifically because I refuse to "get over it". How about you? Are you enjoying cash
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".. Get over it. The sooner you can free up your brain to solve real problems, the better off we all are.
Walling off part of your brain so your precious childhood fantasies of Space 1999 don't get destroyed is just sad.
Grow up."
If you smash your skull open you can get some gunk out of it that's useful for greasing axles.
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"merely" an engineering challenge? Oh is that all?
If you don't see the distinction between a physical impossibility and an engineering difficulty, a discussion on slashdot is probably not going to be sufficient to illuminate this point.
Please describe how electrolysis works on earth first
I voltage is applied across a substance, causing a current to flow... Wait a minute... Why the fuck am I explaining basic physics? Educate [lmgtfy.com] yourself on your own time.
then describe how this magical fuel lab is supposed to work in free-fall with only radiative cooling.
Are other cooling mechanisms required for electrolysis to work? I don't get it. Pretty sure they electrolyze shit all the time on the ISS and I believe that too
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It's probably still easier to get it off the Earth than to get it from space? Because... because you have a gut feeling that confirms this? What the fuck happened to slashdot? Explain why you think it's "probably" easier to cut launch costs to anywhere between 1/3 and 1/1000 of current rates than it is to do what these guys are talking about.
Going by TFA there's almost twice as much worth of metals than water available on this thing, so why would you focus on only getting the water for apparently the only use of making rocket fuel? So basically what your saying is go get this thing and either mine it in space or put it in an orbit that works for us and use it solely as a fuel source for rockets? That's the only use you seem to be focusing on. I mean all you have to is zap it with electricity right? Having a great fuel supply available in space
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Going by TFA there's almost twice as much worth of metals than water available on this thing, so why would you focus on only getting the water for apparently the only use of making rocket fuel?
Indeed, as you noted in your followup post, it's all just conjecture. It's unlikely to be just water, and it's unlikely to contain no water at all. I chose the number that was more favorable to my position, which was perhaps not totally honest. Don't expect rigorous number-crunching from back-of-napkin calculations performed in support of posts in long slashdot threads.
So basically what your saying is go get this thing and either mine it in space or put it in an orbit that works for us and use it solely as a fuel source for rockets? That's the only use you seem to be focusing on.
Both, really. Tow it to Earth orbit, then proceed to mine it in Earth orbit. I'm only focusing on mining water because it's the only non-sci
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Its funny how Slashdot is such a repository of ignorance. Firstly to get the equipment out to this asteroid efficiently you are going to need nuclear rockets. Then you are going to need to mine water to use as reaction mass to move the rock - again with nuclear rockets. The most efficient method isn't electrolysis its just to make the water very hot and it cracks all by itself - the details get a bit more involved and complicated. Hydrogen is the ideal reaction mass fuel for nuclear rockets. For larger obje
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Firstly to get the equipment out to this asteroid efficiently you are going to need nuclear rockets.
Why? Isn't it true that we've launched probes well beyond the asteroid belt without nuclear rockets? Is there a reason why we couldn't get this "equipment" out to this asteroid efficiently using a solar sail, VASIMR, or even a conventional ion thruster (all of which could be launched from Earth using a large chemical rocket)? I mean, shit, if you want to maximize efficiency, we'd launch something using pulsed nuclear propulsion, but is there a reason we can't accept lower levels of efficiency?
Then you are going to need to mine water to use as reaction mass to move the rock - again with nuclear rockets.
Is there a rea
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"Why? Isn't it true that we've launched probes well beyond the asteroid belt without nuclear rockets? Is there a reason why we couldn't get this "equipment" out to this asteroid efficiently using a solar sail, VASIMR, or even a conventional ion thruster (all of which could be launched from Earth using a large chemical rocket)? I mean, shit, if you want to maximize efficiency, we'd launch something using pulsed nuclear propulsion, but is there a reason we can't accept lower levels of efficiency?"
The basic ar
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Eventually (we can only hope) the politicians will realize this and we will get the future back.
This sums up the difference in our arguments. I advocate for the use of viable, existing technology that is not held back by political or legal restrictions, though it may not be the optimal solution from an engineering point of view. You advocate for the opposite.
Personally, I think even an asteroid capture mission using solar sails for propulsion would accomplish its goals long before we overcome the political hurdles of nukes in space. I guess you're an optimist.
Disclaimer: I think it's a real shame
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You'd still need to build the rockets on Earth and launch them to get to the fuel. This means the majority of the rocket mass will still be fuel. Plus, you'll need to bring an empty tank to the refilling station.
You'd only need to bring enough fuel to get to the orbital fuel depot, or more specifically any fuel that is spent beyond Earth orbit doesn't need to be launched from Earth. It is unclear why an empty tank would need to be brought, as presumably the fuel used for launch was stored in a tank, and since the fuel was used for launch, the tank should be empty upon arrival in orbit. Obviously this poses a problem for vertically staged rocket designs, but not others.
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any fuel that is spent beyond Earth orbit doesn't need to be launched from Earth
Very few rockets need to go beyond Earth orbit. Except for some research on other planets, there's nothing out there.
Obviously this poses a problem for vertically staged rocket designs, but not others
Are there other types in use ?
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any fuel that is spent beyond Earth orbit doesn't need to be launched from Earth
Very few rockets need to go beyond Earth orbit. Except for some research on other planets, there's nothing out there.
No rockets "need to" go anywhere. The only things that "need to" happen (in an absolute sense) are those things which are required by the laws of physics or the laws of logic. A millenium ago, very few ships needed to cross oceans. That doesn't mean that there wasn't great benefit to be had from trying to cross them anyway. With time, the need developed. The need did not preceed the development. Today, very few rockets "can go" beyond Earth orbit. With a fuel depot in orbit, that would change. It's possible
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A millenium ago, very few ships needed to cross oceans. That doesn't mean that there wasn't great benefit to be had from trying to cross them anyway.
There was fertile ground, air and water on the other side of the ocean. Space is just empty.
Virtually everything is out there, and we've barely snuck a peek yet.
It's also too far. The next time there's a rainy afternoon, and you have nothing to do, check out the Tsiolkovky rocket equation, pick a destination, maximum allowed travel time, and payload mass, and calculate how much fuel (and fuel tanks) you would need to get there. Please also allow fuel for braking, and landing on the target (or at least orbiting it), and have a realistic payload mass with regards to travel tim
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There was fertile ground, air and water on the other side of the ocean. Space is just empty.
There was plenty of fertile ground, air, and water back in Europe. Columbus wasn't in search of fertile ground, air, and water any more than today's space explorers are in search of emptiness.
It's also too far. The next time there's a rainy afternoon, and you have nothing to do, check out the Tsiolkovky rocket equation, pick a destination, maximum allowed travel time, and payload mass, and calculate how much fuel (and fuel tanks) you would need to get there. Please also allow fuel for braking, and landing on the target (or at least orbiting it), and have a realistic payload mass with regards to travel time and communication with Earth.
It's apparent that chemical rockets aren't going to get us very far. While they may tempt us with reasonable thrust, the specific impulse is lacking, to say the least. That makes them uniquely unsuitable for any voyage where speed is a primary concern, which it is for any destination outside the solar system. Of course
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Drink AstroCorp Stellar Mineral Water! It's literally not of this earth, and may be older than the stars!
Re: But where are the potentional profits? (Score:5, Funny)
Ask De Beers, they pretty much nailed the problem...
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No, they're getting their diamonds from a source that THEY control, and THEY decide what the retail price is.
Like owning an asteroid.
Re:But where are the potentional profits? (Score:4, Informative)
From February 2013:
"The 150-foot-wide (45 meters) asteroid 2012 DA14 — which will zoom within 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometers) of Earth on Friday, marking the closest approach by such a large space rock that astronomers have ever known about in advance — may harbor $65 billion of recoverable water and $130 billion in metals, say officials with celestial mining firm Deep Space Industries."
http://www.space.com/19758-asteroid-worth-billions-2012-da14-flyby.html
Yeah, that's petty expensive water and any value it may be said to have relies on there being a market in space. There is not.
Let's say it's essentially solid ice. That would be about 15000 cubic meters of ice, so they're pricing it at at least 4.3 million dollars per cubic meter, or 4.3 dollars per liter. So yeah, pricey water under the best assumption. More likely it's mostly rock like other near-earth objects.
Now let's say it's mostly rock. It would have to be some pretty damn special rock to be worth $8.6 million per cubic meter.
These numbers were simply made up by people who are interested in doing it for the sake of doing it as long as somebody else pays for it.
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This is way too much work. What do you say we just channel astral water?
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You think there are qualifications for this sort of thing?
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Let's say it's essentially solid ice. That would be about 15000 cubic meters of ice, so they're pricing it at at least 4.3 million dollars per cubic meter, or 4.3 dollars per liter. So yeah, pricey water under the best assumption.
Going by 2013 prices, it costs at least $4000/kg for delivery of anything to LEO. If we assume water has a value of 0 dollars per liter on Earth, that's 4000 dollars per liter in LEO. Using your math, the folks from Deep Space Industries are hoping to sell their asteroid water for 1/1000th its current value. I question the intelligence of anyone that describes such a dramatic decrease in cost as "pricey".
Yeah, that's petty expensive water and any value it may be said to have relies on there being a market in space. There is not.
That's false. We've spent literally millions of dollars on procuring water in LEO. Furthermore, shaving
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The folks from Deep Space Industries are hoping to sell their asteroid water for 1/1000th its current value. I question the intelligence of anyone that describes such a dramatic decrease in cost as "pricey".
Good, then the prof. is right - there's no point in the government spending money on developing technology that private enterprise can so easily and profitably create.
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You know how I know you don't own a business? Because you think banks are a possible source of funding for these types of projects.
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Then you know so much, DO IT. Stop talking, stop typing, stop reading AND DO IT. You presented the slam dunk business case, NOW DO IT.
Thank you for your words of encouragement.
Or shut the hell up with your childish 1960s space age garbage. No one is going anywhere. You are the one with your tired space rhetoric, your empty promises, your delusions about this big market for water in space and these fantasies about these fuel factories floating around a sucking void, and your conflation of these ancient ideas with "progress". You want progress? You're afraid of progress, that's why you clutch to ancient fantasies like a drowning man hanging on to a 2x4 in the Pacific.
I forgive you for your words of anger.
The real progress will happen down here. There's 7 billion people waiting right here for progress.
Progress does not come to those who wait for it. It comes to those who work for it.
No one is waiting out there for your fantasies. And for your sig, that just shows you clutch to the past. Who cares about your 15 year old TMZ crap?
Funny that you should ask! Actually, this AC [slashdot.org] cares about my "15 year old TMZ crap", as evidenced by his query. And this was just a few hours ago! Also, for the record, my sig (well, the expression currently found in my sig) predates TMZ by roughly a decade. You have a funny way of seeing the world.
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I cared about a possible typo from someone whose brain doesn't seem to be operating very well. It wouldn't have been possible for me to not care about information that was not in my possession at the time of not caring. You really are bizarre!
Keep in mind that I'm replying to an unknown number of ACs in this thread. However, I was asked who cares about my sig. I answered that question and provided the reasoning for my answer. Now you're talking about possible typos and some very awkward statement about possessing information that I can't parse quite right. I don't know what you're saying, but if you have some objection to the response I provided, I ask that you word it in a way that makes sense to me.
You talk about physics but brush aside any physical argument against your childhood fantasies.
Nike's slogan isn't a "physical argument", no
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I guess we could just spend all the money on the same old things ad nauseam because it might take a while to start getting a return on anything else. Why try for progress when we can just keep doing the same things our ancestors did?
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Tell me how you intend to make a *profit* by going into space with massive amounts of technology and resources???
To get the same things we already have here?
True, even with those kinds of numbers, I very much doubt it will be profitable to bring it back to Earth. It does, however, enable a leap forward for human spaceflight. It's tremendously expensive to lift stuff from Earth's surface, and water is far and away the most useful resource for astronauts, well beyond simply drinking or bathing with it. Surround a spacecraft with it and you've got a radiation barrier. Electrolyze it for rocket fuel (and potentially other types of fuel for backup power) and compone
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> If you're on an asteroid, moon, or planet, mix it with regolith to help create surface structures.
Well, you could probably use the water as part of the feedstock to synthesize some sort of binding agent, but wet sand alone isn't much of a construction material unless it's frozen, and there's not many places this side of Jupiter where water will reliably stay frozen in vacuum. Even mud hut style construction requires soil, not sand - aka organic matter that almost certainly won't be present away from E
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water is far and away the most useful resource for astronauts
It would be a lot cheaper if we just kept the astronauts here on Earth. It's not like they're doing much useful stuff up there.
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Tell me how you intend to make a *profit* by going into space with massive amounts of technology and resources???
To get the same things we already have here?
It's a matter of weight, not of composition. Even relatively small asteroids can contain metals priced in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
http://www.asterank.com/ [asterank.com]
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The important measure is not what the situation is, but where it's going. The easy surface minerals are gone, and as we dig deeper the minig gets exponentially more expensive at the same time as it runs into increasing environmental restrictions. When we consider how friendly space is to machines, a highly automated asteroidal mining operation could prove cheaper in the long run.
What we need to do next is assay a large sampling of asteroids for mineral content. Why not send out probes equipped with a single
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"There IS profit to be made on mining asteroids."
That's absolutely ludicrous. Go find out the spot price for mineral ore that's available by the tons right here on Earth.
Tell me how you intend to make a *profit* by going into space with massive amounts of technology and resources???
To get the same things we already have here?
Space is not a cash machine. The discovery made getting there, being there, and even failing to get there are not something you can readily take to the pawn shop or stock exchanges. There is not a quite simple enough answer for you that would withstand the scrutiny of slashdot. But your question is answered easily if it is even remotely physically and economically possible to nudge a small asteroid, change its path slightly, and have it eventually collide with the Earth, or get into an accessable Earth orb
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Asteroid insurance?
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Where did it say that the ARM was a profit driven mission? If it is, why is the taxpayer subsidizing what a private company could do with its own money?
Congress (Score:3, Interesting)
... inadequate to complete the identification of 90 percent of hazardous near-Earth objects 140 meters or greater by 2020 as mandated by the law.
This is the problem with Congress. How the hell do you make a law saying you need to identify 90% of something we can't validate at all? Who's going to say when you reach 90%? If we get clobbered by a rock it's clearly part of the 10% we didn't know, gee sorry.
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Usually it's people trying to reform human society that CAUSE those things.
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Being clobbered by a rock is one of those low-probability-but-could-happen events, like suddenly having a new plague come at us from Africa. It behooves us to prepare for such things. Rock clobberings, on scales ranging from Chicxulub to Chelyabinsk, HAVE happened.
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Very low probability in any given year, but inevitable in the long term, and VERY high risk. Also much cheaper to stop that a much less damaging global pandemic of a particularly virulent strain of Ebola, provided we recognize the threat soon enough.
And it's not just "planet killers" that are worth identifying. How much damage, in dollars, do you suppose that Russian airburst meteor would have caused if it blew over NYC instead? I mean it was estimated to have caused $33 million in damage out in the Russ
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For "dinosaur killers" I think you're right - impacts are somewhere in the tens to hundreds of millions of years apart. Of course at 60-someodd million years since the last one we're probably about due for another.
For less devastating asteroids - well as I recall it's estimated that relatively tiny (20m) "Russian airburst" class meteors impact the Earth at a rate of a few every year, though it might have been one every few years, I forget. The vast majority though end up hitting even less inhabited regio
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Who's going to say when you reach 90%?
You ought to be able to use physics combined with observations to come up with an approximation of the number of near-Earth asteroids of any given size. Once you know how many there are it is just a matter of counting.
You can also observe the decline in the rate of discovery of new objects to infer how many there are in total.
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I get that there are ways to guesstimate how many X there are. But I think that laws should be clean cut. I'm fine with saying that "our goal is to find as many as possible" or even to say that "our goal is to find 90%", but if the law says we're to find 90% of asteroids larger than 140km within 20 years spending 300k/yr that's bullshit.
A law, and I don't even think it should be called a law (it should be called a budget), would be better if it said we're going t
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This isn't the problem - detecting these asteriods is a pretty well-understood problem, and the B612 / Sentinel project has a good plan to complete it - but it's not being funded by the Government - it's being run by a non-profit organization. The law is essentially an "unfunded mandate," and I'd guess that there's no particular penalty for not complying with it. However, the Sentinel project likely needs about $30M/year, not $300k/year, but that's still much less than the $200M/year that this chap suggests
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How the hell do you make a law saying you need to identify 90% of something we can't validate at all?
It's called a survey, you systematically search a given area with instruments that can detect what you're looking for, it's not done until the survey is complete.
If we get clobbered by a rock it's clearly part of the 10% we didn't know, gee sorry.
Someone gives you nine lives and you're bitching about not having 10?
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... inadequate to complete the identification of 90 percent of hazardous near-Earth objects 140 meters or greater by 2020 as mandated by the law.
This is the problem with Congress. How the hell do you make a law saying you need to identify 90% of something we can't validate at all? Who's going to say when you reach 90%?...
There is a field of mathematics that has this problem firmly under control. It is called "statistics". Constructing a procedure for making this determination would be a reasonable homework assignment in a statistics class, it is no more difficult than that.
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Statistical analysis - the most likely number remaining is a function of the rate of discovery of new objects. As the rate drops, so does the likely number of remaining undiscovered objects.
my thoughts (Score:1)
A toilet big enough to flush $200 million per year. We should probably fund a study to create one.
Makes sense (Score:2)
It makes total sense. Why fund a redirect project if you're not even aware of anything that needs redirecting? And if you put the money into the survey and actually find something that needs redirecting, I doubt you'd have a problem getting a budget for it. ;-)
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I don't think keeping it from hitting the Earth was the only reason they wanted to redirect an asteroid. They want to get it to lunar orbit so that they can have more time to do more detailed science on it. It's also a big technology goal to keep us developing.
Completely Missed the Point (Score:5, Informative)
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And the NASA HEMD guys say that to do that, you first need to have a deep space flight "with training wheels," i.e., one to something like high retrograde lunar orbit (far away to be serious, and actually test the deep space parts of the mission, but close enough you can meaningfully abort) and that, in practice, to both get the money for the test AND to make the test more realistic, the astronauts need some goal for spending 2 weeks orbiting outside the Moon, and the ARM provides that.
If the Earth had a we
No Community Consensus Here (Score:4, Informative)
He has been saying this for a while, most recently (to my knowledge) at the recent Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) [usra.edu] meeting in DC. I was there and have to say that the community (at least, the sample of the community in that room) did not come to even rough consensus on his proposal, and was in fact split roughly 50-50. There is, however, a pretty strong consensus on the funding of a asteroid survey mission, an infrared telescope on an interior orbit to the Earth to find most of the possible "city-buster" NEA. This is pretty much what the B612 foundation is proposing, but they haven't raised the money yet, nor is on any NASA funding plans.
My own personal opinion, FWIW, is that Binzel is wrong and that the ARM mission is a first good step to Mars.
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He seems to be looking at money spent on an asteroid project as money that could have been spent on HIS asteroid project. Meanwhile the money that is being spent is ultimately being spent to reduce further expenses on future space projects, maybe even his if he considered the potential merits of this mission he's seeking to squash.
I am not 100% sure that he is, but you are correct, he gives that impression. What is (IMHO) much more likely is that, if his ideas carry the day, ARM will be canceled and nothing will take its place and (with all due respect to Elon Musk) we will be set back another decade on going to Mars.
Note, however, that the asteroid survey mission could not be finished in time to provide a target for the first stage of ARM (or, to put it the other way, the ARM timetable does not allow for starting and running a surve
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$500 million total would fully fund the B612 / Sentinel proposal. I'm not at all sure how far they're getting on private donations to fund it so far - but I'd like to know.
Maybe he should donate his time (Score:1, Flamebait)
If he's so concerned, perhaps he should donate his time and form a non-profit organization which solicits donations to do the survey. It's how the republicans have suggested we deal with homelessness, child nutrition, mental health, and the arts. Why should his pet project/idea get a larger share of federal dollars?
How dare he threaten NASA pork? (Score:4)
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Once humans can reach one asteroid in its native orbit, the gateway is opened such that hundreds (if not thousands) more will be accessible, enabling a steady programme of exploration to be unrolled in the late 2020s and 2030s.
Don't start with the survey (Score:2)
If you build a successful asteroid mining industry, then you can be damned sure that there's going to be a ton of effort put into surveying as many asteroids as possible. It will necessarily follow.
Sentinel private program at fraction of NASA cost (Score:2)
The B612 / Sentinel program (see sentinel.org) proposes to complete the asteroid survey mission at a total cost of under $500 million, and is currently collecting private donations to launch and complete the misson. This proposed cost is a tiny fraction of the $200 million per year that this MIT prof is suggesting is required.
So here's a no-brainer proposal - divert a fraction of the NASA mission cost so that the Sentinel mission can be completed without blowing a giant hole in NASA's bloated budget. The Se