Fire up the Power Point! Set the viewgraphs to boundless optimism!

[james_davis_nicoll]

A worthy successor to GHWB's Space Exploration Initiative and GWB's Vision for Space Exploration: NASA's crewed rockets are absolutely, positively going to Mars; please don't bring up all the previous times they promised that and it didn't happen.

Comments

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

If you want to prevent asteroid strikes, the program looks like this:

(1) Build telescopes (some in space) to catalogue all potential impactors

(2) Check the orbits of those found in (1) to see if any will hit Earth in the next century

(3) Only if (2) gives a non-empty set is money spent on diversion.

The ability to diagnose the problem before spending money on curing it is politically fatal, since the most likely outcome is "no great amount of spending is needed".

Already done

[(Anonymous)]

We've already catalogued pretty much all potential impactors over 1 km in diameter. By 2025 we'll have catalogued pretty much all down to 300 m in diameter. 150 m by midcentury seems entirely reasonable.

Note that we've long since got all the dinosaur-killers and civilization-enders. We're working our way down through the "year without a summer" and "one city or province has a really bad day" categories.

(This is not widely appreciated. Most people have no idea how thoroughly we've scanned the inner Solar System in the last 15 years.)


Doug M.

Re: Already done

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

AIUI mapping asteroids is one thing, but there's always surprise comets. Though by the same token they might not be subject to slow gravity tugs.

Re: Already done

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

so you're saying there really is no stealth in space?

--Dave, next you'll be saying polydactylous cats can't mine lunar He3!!1!

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

The lack of an n-body solution prevents complete confidence there are no false negatives. Should one turn up, having the asteroid-diversion technology proven and skilled users on staff would be advantageous.

[(Anonymous)]

...actually, over civilizational timescales -- thousands to tens of thousands of years -- we can be very very very close to certain there are no false negatives.

Most asteroid orbits are not chaotic over those time scales. And the odds of your average asteroid suddenly finding the delta-vee to dramatically move its orbit? comparable to the Moon suddenly jumping out of the Earth's orbit. viz., theoretically possible, but don't hold your breath.


Doug M.