Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) said Friday that there’s a cool $100 million penciled into President Barack Obama’s proposed federal budget for a plan to lasso an asteroid with a robotic spacecraft and then safely tow it into orbit around the moon. And Nelson, who’s chairman of the Senate Science and Space Subcommittee as well as the second sitting member of Congress to fly in space, should probably know.
Clearly, the movement to learn how to move asteroids around has gotten some momentum in recent months. Not long after a damaging meteor struck Russia in February, four asteroids zipped by the earth in just one week in early March.
A former NASA director, Scott Hubbard, has been raising $450 million in private funds for nonprofit B612 Foundation, which has the goal of enlarging the human ability to seek out and find dangerous asteroids before they get too close to earth. However, some scientists questioned the purpose of finding out we’re about to get pelted by an asteroid, since we currently have no technology to do much of anything about it.
In addition to allowing NASA to develop and test technology for moving asteroids around safely, the “park it by the moon” plan would also bring an asteroid conveniently close to earth. That would advance an existing mission for human travel to an asteroid by four years. President Obama had previously said that humans might visit one of the giant space rocks by 2025.
Senator Nelson said the new plan will move up the date to 2021. Oh, and he’s also excited about the concept of mining the asteroid for potentially valuable minerals.
He said that we should see the item in Obama’s new budget when it’s released next week.
Although it sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie, Senator Nelson told an Orlando, FL press conference that we could see a robot ship catch a 500 ton asteroid by 2019.
[asteroid photo courtesy Igor Zh based on NASA/JPL-Caltech images via Shutterstock.com ]