While the plan for NASA to snag a small asteroid and bring it closer to Earth to be visited by astronauts, recently confirmed by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-FL, has received some praise, the accolades are not universal. Dr. Paul Spudis, a planetary geologist and an advocate of a return to the moon, has offered an April 5, 2013 post on his Lunar Resources Blog that suggests the scheme is less than meets the eye.
Spudis’s main contention that the asteroid hauling scheme is a desperate attempt by NASA to figure out a destination that astronauts could go to that is not the lunar surface. Spudis is not alone in suggesting that the Obama space policy has gone off track with the abandonment of the moon as a destination. Al Carnesale of UCLA, who headed the National Research Council study that condemned the asteroid scheme, recently suggested that a return to the moon would be more suitable as a goal. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden responded that there would be no American led return to the moon in his lifetime, despite evidence that such a goal would garner a great deal more support than the asteroid scheme.
Spudis also criticized the asteroid capture scheme as not having much scientific or commercial value.
“The problem with re-arranging the Solar System for our personal convenience is that it’s difficult in time, energy and effort. Only the smallest asteroid could possibly be brought back to cislunar space; the object described in the Keck report is only a few meters across – a dried mud ball. An asteroid that small will have virtually no geological diversity, thus giving us limited information about asteroid evolution (NEAs almost that large already exist in meteorite collections on the Earth.) A body that size could be significant for resource utilization, except that we don’t yet know what we would process, how we would extract materials from it, and what we would do with the products once we have them. Water is an extremely valuable resource in space, but the current fly-and-discard template of the Orion-SLS architecture does not feature an easy way to incorporate water into creating new capabilities. The idea that platinum group metals (PGM) mined from an asteroid could pay commercially might be tested in such a scenario, but it’s not clear that a NEA suitable for capture and transport to cislunar enables that, given that we don’t know at this point even the nature of the feedstock we’ll get for processing.”
Spudis also cited safety concerns, the fear that something might go sideways and that the asteroid might hit the Earth, something he suggests would be more perception than reality.
The bottom line, according to Spudis, is that the asteroid capture scheme is yet another distraction from the near term destination that really matters, the lunar surface, especially the lunar poles with their deposits of water ice.
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