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[martinuzz]

I wonder if Kim Jong Un can read english

Great Lidl can speak angerwish better than Ta-lump.

[Frumple]

*coughs* Amusingly enough, asteroid capture is something that could very, very easily help create self-sustaining settlements on other bodies. Chunk of materials you can relatively easily move around and have in place and ready to go with mostly-space born equipment you bring in yourself or set up ahead of time, as you set things up on the ground? Good stuff.

Be plenty miffed it was someone else, too, though. There hasn't been many reductions in NASA funding et al I've been terribly cheerful about over the last couple decades.

[smjjames]

BTW, Trump's new Cuba policy isn't exactly popular with the Republicans in the Senate.

[Playergamer]

don't get why you guys care so much about asteroid capture. realistically, if an asteroid hits in the next couple of years we won't have the tech to stop it anyway, and any time after that civilization will have already collapsed thanks to the Second American Civil War and aftershocks.

[nenjin]

So.....pressure Cuba, placate NK? (It's weird enough to be true that Trump would have Rodman try to open secret channels between the US and NK. But it isn't exactly official or backed by a stupid tweet.)

That seems like the kind of strategy Generalisimo Donalde' would approve of. Double back on the country next door you just normalized relationships with so you can shake a few more nickels out of them, and kiss up to a megalomaniac who runs his country like a slave kingdom and whose political dynasty is responsible for countless humans' rights abuses.

On the other hand, maybe Rodman is just makin' some kek.

don't get why you guys care so much about asteroid capture. realistically, if an asteroid hits in the next couple of years we won't have the tech to stop it anyway, and any time after that civilization will have already collapsed thanks to the Second American Civil War and aftershocks.

Because we gotta show them space rawks wots wot.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Rod-Man is a total fucking weirdo, let it not be forgotten.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

A higher priority in my opinion, is creating permanent, self-sustaining settlements on other bodies.

They don't enough money in their budget to pull that off, though.  They have to make do with what they can, and asteroid capturing is one of the things they can pull off with the budget they have.

A higher priority in my opinion, is creating permanent, self-sustaining settlements on other bodies.

I agree that it should be a high priority (the Moon would be better than Mars for a whole variety of reasons), but that doesn't mean that we can't work on the asteroid stuff in parallel. Of course, there's only so much budget to go around, and NASA doesn't really get enough.

I'm not mad because Trump cancelled it, though it'd be better for the admin at NASA to do it as they know what they want, can, and need to do.

Anyone cancelling tech development that could avert civilization ending disasters because of short term thinking earns my ire.

don't get why you guys care so much about asteroid capture. realistically, if an asteroid hits in the next couple of years we won't have the tech to stop it anyway, and any time after that civilization will have already collapsed thanks to the Second American Civil War and aftershocks.

We have to start somewhere to get the tech to do so.

[smjjames]

You accidentially screwed up the quote box there, just letting you know, and the second OSG quote is actually me.

[Draignean]

The only reason you guys are mad about this is because Trump cancelled it. If some administrator over at NASA canceled it, nobody would give a shit.

Err.. Ori, you can't say that. I mean, seriously, that's beyond your powers of deduction unless you're the Omnissiah.  Personally, here's my rubric for determining whether I dislike something just because Trump did it. I replace every instance of Trump's name with General Mattis. If that suddenly makes the proposal seem like a sensible thing, as it did with the Syria strike, then I will admit that I'm biased against Trump and that's probably a fine idea.

I, like others, oppose the Keystone pipeline for a variety of reasons, but I'm willing to let that go as one of those 'the parties must compromise' issues. We got healthcare last round, the Republicans deserve a concession for something they want.

Then we come down to things like the Wall, the breaking of the Paris Accords, the repealing of environmental protection acts, and a half-dozen other incidents that I would oppose regardless of who advocated them. As far as the asteroid capture goes, that's something we're going to need to do if we're going to leave the fragile cradle of the Earth. Yep, the mission was expensive and would likely bring back a hunk of rock with a limited yield of the really nice stuff- yet it would show we could.

The plane the Wright brothers flew stayed in the air for seconds. I don't know if I can change your mind, but we need to keep pawing at space. We need to work on orbital construction, and unless we miraculously find a way to send materials up from earth much more cheaply, that means orbital mining. We can't expect a colony when every resource has to be shipped in from foundries on earth. Small expensive steps.

tl;dr: We don't all hate what Trump does just because he does it- but we're damn concerned about where things are going.

 

[origamiscienceguy]

I am all for space exploration, but I don't see any practical benefit to spending thousands of delta-v to move an asteroid around the moon.

[Frumple]

Besides the whole more practical experience in moving things around space thing, the easier access to whatever's in the asteroid whenever we got around to mining it, a platform to test space born resource extraction, probably other stuff 'cause it's not like these have to be single purpose...

[smjjames]

Technically, it's a boulder grabbed off the surface of a larger asteroid, and yeah, in practical terms, putting it in orbit of the moon sounds rather silly. But science isn't always about practicality.

[Hanslanda]

I am all for space exploration, but I don't see any practical benefit to spending thousands of delta-v to move an asteroid around the moon.

To prove we can do it, and to force miserly republican senators to give us a bigger budget to explore space.

[Frumple]

Eh, if you're going to argue it's not worth the investment at this time, there's more ground for that. But the practical benefits out of it are definitely rather non-zero. Just about anything that involves doing more up and about in space has practical benefit, if for absolutely no other reason than just because it lets us get more experience and build a better body of knowledge of the risks and best practices involved.

[origamiscienceguy]

There are so many space projects more deserving of funding. If the project was to land a probe on a near-Earth asteroid, I would be all for that. (Cause it hasn't been done before, and it would be cheap.)