Finally, a NASA mission worthy of that formerly great agency.
At some point in the next 10 years NASA will send an unmanned spacecraft, with new propulsion, navigation, and robotic systems designed specifically for travel to Mars, to retrieve a boulder from an asteroid.
Once it grabs the boulder, it'll spend a few years bringing it back to be placed in orbit around the moon where two astronauts, sporting newly engineered deep-space mission space suits, will examine it up-close and personal.
This should be exciting for normal people with lives, not just sci-fi nerds like me. I'm imagining already, manned mining colonies all over the solar system(pics 1-2) and permanent human colonies on Mars(pic 3).
[click on any image for a bigger view]
[click on any image for a bigger view]
2 comments:
I hope this comes to something, Ed. One of NASA's main problems is that each new President feels the need to discard the previous administration's pet project and come up with their own. Then throw in the Congress with their mixture of sincere interest and parochial concerns and you get what we have now.
I'd like to think that the ideas of asteroid mining and a Mars colony transcend administrations at this point. We've been talking about both for decades. It's practically axiomatic that both are worth doing....in my opinion.
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