…doesn’t like the asteroid mission.
Some Twitter responses:
@jeff_foust @spacecom I'm looking for an actual argument in her article, but not finding one.
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) December 23, 2014
@planet4589 You know who's the last person I'd ask what our goals in space should be? An astronaut. @jeff_foust @spacecom
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) December 23, 2014
Hate to break it to you, Marsha, but there are no "projects that require heavy-lift rockets." http://t.co/YadDx8bfIX
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) December 23, 2014
“You’ll look in vain. It’s Marsha.”
Me-owww.
Good one, Rand. ;-p
I can actually see a Mars-related point to the asteroid redirect mission. If I were planning astronaut flights to Mars, I’d go Buzz Aldrin’s way and build cycler stations for the interplanetary journey. Obviously most of the mass for such stations (radiation shielding, life-support consumables, propellant reserves) would come from near-Earth asteroids which are already found in orbits in this region of space, so the asteroid redirect mission would work as the first step in an aggressive programme of building up these materials at a station on a cycler orbit. The joke is that, so far as I know, nobody at NASA seems to have thought of this.
Stephen
Oxford, UK
Buzz Aldrin, doesn’t appear to be a fan of going to an asteroid either. A quote for a recent GQ article, “….Obama says he wants to send a human to an asteroid. Why would he say that? I’ll tell you why he said that. To satisfy the public. To show progress. But that’s not going to the moon. That’s not going to Mars. That’s playing around with a Mickey Mouse rock. We’ve got to get rid of that….”.
NASA is not going to be sending people to Mars. There’s no money, no hardware, and no will. The sooner all us space cadets realize that, the better. The truth will set you free, but it’s really gonna hurt.
I agree: An asteroid mission seems not just boring, but of limited utility.
But we all know why ARM is what NASA is talking about right now – though you’d think it was to get as many ex-astronauts as possible the opportunity to bewail in public the fact that we aren’t repeating the Apollo program.
We certainly aren’t going to Mars for a long time, not unless alien space technology or unobtanium are located on the Red Planet’s surface. We * might* be able to go back to the Moon, if NASA were to maximize use of existing launch vehicles and foxed cost contracts. But that would mean a lot of unhappy contractors and congressmen, so…