The Discovery Enterprise: Animation of NASA's Proposed Asteroid Retrieval Mission

--- In spacesettlers, sraj wrote:

> What will be the mass of this rock? Looks quite small.
>
> Should we not be a bit more ambitious and try to put
> something larger in Moon orbit, even if the time taken to
> change the orbit of the Asteroid is say ten to twenty years.

I don't think that, at this time, there's much point in doing anything with a ten to twenty year timeline. It's just too easy for enough people to lose interest and cancel altogether.

Now, I could agree with the idea of doing something more ambitious than grabbing this one little rock. I'd like to suggest grabbing *several* little rocks. Say, a half dozen rocks, as diverse as possible, of five to ten metres, with the option of combining two missions into one if a particularly interesting ten to fifteen metre rock makes itself available. The rock in the video is seven metres, so that's apparently what NASA is confident we can do in an appropriate time frame.