Since back in the 90′s, many in NASA leadership saw this coming. That’s why affordability, increasing flight rate for less yearly cost, reducing development costs, and overall doing significantly more for the same (or less) budget were emphasized by so many back then. Unfortunately, in the chaos that has followed after Columbia, these people did not get into leadership positions. The leadership has instead been filled with people who have an uncanny ability to avoid making waves.

So we are left with leadership that awaits some glory days, whines about budgets, has no real plan, and cares nothing if numbers never add up, but which have demonstrated tenacious survival skills.

-Truer words!

We cannot stop an asteroid so it has to be pushed out of the way.

A solid object can be knocked off course using a bat. Unfortunately a cloud of rouble cannot, the bat simply passes through the rouble.

It may be possible to use explosives to change the course of the asteroid but NASA is not in the weapon making business. Should an asteroid need nuking that will be a mission for the Department of Defence, the warriors may need NASA’s help to get there.

That leaves catching the asteroid and putting it somewhere safe. ARM involves catching a small asteroid and putting it safely in orbit around the Moon. Later missions will have to divert larger asteroids.

Sending people to collect a sample of the asteroid is really a different mission but they are so interrelated that planning them at the same time makes sense.

Detecting dangerous asteroids is a related mission. Most of the United Nations will be involved. Keep ARM separate from asteroid detection otherwise several African politicians will turn up wanting bribes from NASA.

The ARM adds almost nothing to detection, and nothing whatsoever to long term detection systems. It provides meager funding to provide it with data on an object to snag, and nothing again afterward. I hope for all of our sakes those involved in actual planetary defense don’t consider that the boon you do.

Interception systems? Come on now, we already know how to intercept celestial objects, that’s part of the reason ARM has been proposed, so nothing there. And the techniques and technology used to tow a tiny object to lunar orbit is nothing like the techniques or technologies we would need to deflect an asteroid large enough to pose a legitimate threat. Did you really think that the ARM mission profile would be used to scale up for a city, regional, or planetary threat? Of course not. We’d use the tools on hand in a rush, or develop far more effective strategies if we had the time than are useful with a car sized rock. And we won’t be able to do either if those few advocates we have fighting for better object detection and mitigation accept this stunt as a wise use of resources in the name of planetary defense.

You thirst for more attention – any attention – to be directed towards celestial threats is causing you to advocate for a mission that wastes funds for no purpose at all, and all because it says “asteroid” in the title. If we were grabbing, say, some large old satellite left out beyond the moon, something tells me you’d immediately switch positions.

When launch costs drop, you can be sure that technologies developed in those missions will be used in future missions.