NASA's Going to Try to Lasso an Asteroid Before Congress Can Stop It

NASA’s new budget calls for an acceleration of its plan to capture an asteroid and bring it into lunar orbit, making the controversial idea more likely to happen.

If you’ve forgotten, the plan is to send a robotic, solar-powered spacecraft to lasso an asteroid and bring it into orbit around the moon. From there, NASA will send a crewed mission to take samples of the asteroid and return them to Earth, using its still-in-development Orion spacecraft, which is expected to overtake the shuttle as the agency’s main manned spaceship.

It’s an audacious plan and one that has more than a few detractors. Several members of Congress have gotten behind bills that would forbid the agency to do it, calling it a mission that “appears to be a costly and complex distraction” and Buzz Aldrin has said the whole thing is a waste of time.

“Bringing an asteroid back to Earth? What’s that have to do with space exploration?” Aldrin asked at the Humans to Mars Summit last May. “If we were moving outward from there and an asteroid is a good stopping point, then fine. But now it’s turned into a whole planetary defense exercise at the cost of our outward expansion.”

To that NASA has said whatever, guys.

In NASA’s 2015 budget request, the agency has asked for $705.5 million for “Space Technology,” which includes the asteroid retrieval mission, a 22 percent increase over the amount it received in 2014. Of that, the White House says $133 million would be spent on technology for the asteroid redirect mission, though more could potentially be spent within that $705.5 million. NASA has not specifically earmarked how much would be spent on the mission in 2015, but estimates that it’ll cost about $2 billion over the course of about a decade.

NASA’s request (and it is just that, a request—these things tend to get ripped to shreds as they go through the Congressional approval process) is important because it reiterates that the agency is serious about the mission, detractors be damned.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden (and President Obama) have said that going to an asteroid is a key step towards getting humans to eventually go to Mars. Tuesday, he said "our stepping stone approach to sending humans to Mars involves continued research on the space station, testing our new capabilities beyond the moon, exploring an asteroid and ultimately sending a crewed mission to the Red Planet. In order to carry out these pioneering missions, we have to develop technologies for our asteroid redirect mission that will lead to the subsequent first crewed mission to Mars."

Others, like Aldrin, say if we want to go to Mars, we should just do it instead of wasting time on asteroids.

Both sides make fair points. We should perhaps know how to deal with an asteroid, in case a giant one is headed directly at Earth. And asteroid mining is probably going to make a few companies very, very rich one day. But it’s hard to see what taking humans to lunar orbit to sample an asteroid has to do with going to Mars, something that the administration has repeatedly says it still wants to do, someday.

Despite the fact that NASA’s overall budget is a mere fraction of one percent of the total overall budget, Congress loves slashing its budget, and the asteroid mission is already unpopular. Right now, it has the backing of Obama and Bolden, but space missions almost always span several administrations, which is one of the reasons it can be so hard to get anything that doesn’t have broad approval done.

With a project this controversial and one that has no definite timeline or budget (it’s expected to be completed sometime in the mid 2020s, but who really knows), the agency’s best bet is to sink as much money into it in the first couple years so that, by the time there’s a change in leadership, it makes little sense to scrap it. With three budgets left, Obama and Bolden appear to be pushing as hard as they can to get this thing underway and off the ground. If they can get the money they asked for in 2015, they’ll be well on their way.