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

Sailor,

I agree completely! We need to be dragging anything and everything we can get a manipulator on into some convenient corner of home, whether it be cis-lunar, Lagrange point or just in a high orbit. The more variety in these masses the better. We want lots and lots of metal, but volatiles are at least as important or more so to habitation. We need to give the steel men and the wildcatters every reason to get excited about mountains of easy to get at resources in close location, where theres more power than they can ever use to help with the heavy lifting, and an environment that naturally lends itself to refining and purification rather than degradation and contamination. prove to them that there are trillions of dollars worth of assets flying around up there and they will get themselves and their crews up there however they have to. This will result in cheap massively reusable orbiters due to the intense competition, deadline driven by billionairs focused on becoming trillionairs, and dont doubt that thats what would happen if we could get the rocks in place. Once the industrialists get going, GHabitats will immediately become a necessity. Probably it will begin with permanent low g quarters on the moon where workers will cycle after theyve had enough zero gworking on the rocks. While at work, theyll probably start with something like Bigelows until they can get something big enough to put under spin and then go bigger from there.
And thusly do we accomplish our goal...
Below is a link to a NASA mission for 2019 where theyre sending 2 spacecraft, a hammer (@14000mph) and a moniter, to a double asteroid group called Didymos. They will target the smaller rock (1500 meters compared to 8000 meters for the larger) for the impact, and moniter it from the companion craft and from Earth to see the results of the impact with the objective of learning to deflect asteroids for planetary defense. My thought is that once they get a handle on the orbital mechanics involved why not deflect the rocks so that they are bvrought gently nearer Earth space where we can go out and grab them?

Scientists Plan for Asteroid Deflection Mission

Leading astronomers in the United States and Europe are planning to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid in order to research deflection methods. The project, entitled the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment Mission (AIDA), will be launched in 2019 and will see two space rockets sent on a mission to reach the asteroid Didymos.
Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment Mission (AIDA)

From: sailor.barsoom
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2013 1:07 PM
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: 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.