NASA is taking a plan to send an unmanned spacecraft to capture an asteroid and bring it into orbit around the Moon seriously. Aviation Week reports that NASA's budget request for fiscal 2014 will include $100 million to help fund the asteroid retrieval mission. A feasibility study looking into the project was prepared last April year by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, and it proposed that capturing a 1.1-million pound, 7-meter wide asteroid using an automated spacecraft would cost $2.6 billion.
The plan "has attracted favor" from NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, according to Aviation Week, and the space agency's Bob Jacobs told Space.com this January that "NASA and the agency's Jet Propulsion...
via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/29/4162508/nasa-said-to-request-100-million-for-plan-to-capture-near-earth-asteroid
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