I just read an interesting article regarding this year’s Planetary Defense Congress, held in College Park, Maryland. The panel held a “wargame” of sorts over what to do with an incoming asteroid of an average
Read moreCategory: Asteroids!
Outbound Operational Plan for Space Migration: Robotic Asteroid Exploration
So far, I’ve been charting a programmatic course that has taken Outbound to the moon with robotic surveys and construction demonstrations. Now it’s time to flex some operational muscle and go for stretch goals. In
Read moreBennu, Not a Potato This Time
This week has humanity reaching out to another asteroid, this one named Bennu, the target of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Bennu is not content to be a tumbling potato in space, but is rather geometric in
Read moreMars Study – Oldie But Goodie
Robert Zubrin’s The Case For Mars (TCM) has been in publication for a couple of decades now, and is a seminal work in the space advocacy genre. Really, it shares space next to weighty volumes like those
Read moreAres vs. Luna – Should the Siblings Fight?
I am a very long-time supporter and member of the Moon Society, from way back in the 1990’s, and feel pretty strongly about the need to establish a beachhead on the Moon. There are a
Read moreReasons to ARM Wrestle – Item 10
Leaving something permanent. One of the saddest things about the Apollo missions is that they didn’t leave anything permanent that made future missions any easier. When Apollo was canceled, all that was left were museum
Read moreReasons to ARM Wrestle – Item 9
Providing more experience with on-asteroid operations. If the Rosetta/Philae mission should tell us anything, it’s that there’s still a lot to learn, from an engineering standpoint, about how to operate successfully on the surface of
Read moreReasons To ARM Wrestle – Item 8
Providing the beginnings of a lunar gateway. It turns out that getting to and from lunar DRO, and to the lunar surface from a lunar DRO, isn’t massively different from getting to and from Earth-moon
Read moreTriad – Three Technologies Unite for Mars
VASIMR Plasma Propulsion Small Fusion Systems Asteroid Retrieval In the past few months the three items of my extreme interest have hit the news, and it has me pondering if NASA may be putting together
Read moreIt May Not Be ARM Option B, But It Helps Light The Way
For more background on this mission: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/osiris-rex/index.html The Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security — Regolith Explorer spacecraft will travel to a near-Earth asteroid, called Bennu (formerly 1999 RQ36), and bring at least a 2.1-ounce
Read more