THE next American astronauts to travel beyond the International Space Station won’t want to take any giant leaps. NASA’s next stop will probably be an asteroid, where explorers would have to be careful not to drift into space.
Long-awaited details of the White House’s plan for the space agency emerged last week in a speech by President Barack Obama. A new spacecraft will be ready by 2025 to carry astronauts into deep space, beginning with a trip to an asteroid, he said.
Travelling to an asteroid will not be easy. Astronauts will be exposed to higher levels of radiation, and will have to find a way to attach themselves to the asteroid’s surface to cope with its weak gravity.
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But the pay-off for planetary defence could be big. One future mission might be to nudge an asteroid from its original orbit. That “would demonstrate once and for all that we’re smarter than the dinosaurs and could therefore avoid what they didn’t”, White House science adviser John Holdren said in a discussion after the speech.
