<div dir="ltr">
<div class="">
<div class="">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif" alt="The New York Times" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0"></a>
</div>
<div class="">
</div>
</div>
<br clear="all"><hr align="left" size="1">
<div class="">August 21, 2013</div>
<h1>Rocks in Space</h1>
<h6 class="">By
<span>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by GAIL COLLINS"><span>GAIL COLLINS</span></a></span></h6>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
So, which would you rather do: Capture an asteroid or go back to the moon? </p>
<p>
This is one of the many interesting issues facing Congress that we
probably will not have time to debate once Congress actually comes back
next month. Then it’ll be nothing but Obamacare and government shutdowns
and the occasional discussion about whether Senator Ted Cruz has
managed to dispose of his recently discovered dual Canadian citizenship.
</p>
<p>
Which I am personally looking forward to a lot. But today let’s consider the American space program. </p>
<p>
Space exploration is one of the extremely few areas in which there is a
lot of bipartisan agreement in Washington. For instance, both parties
believe that the United States should be trying to get to Mars.
Eventually. Nobody thinks this will happen anytime soon — partly because
the technology is so challenging and partly because Congress keeps
cutting the space budget. So far, NASA has not shown any interest in the
tactic being used by a Dutch company that hopes to establish a Martian
colony in about 10 years, with money that would come in part from
producing a reality series, somewhere along the lines of “Big Brother"
or perhaps “Real Housewives of the Red Planet.” </p>
<p>
The third point of wide bipartisan agreement is that nobody wants their
constituents to be clobbered by an asteroid. Really, this is a priority.
The Obama administration is currently promoting an “asteroid grand
challenge,” in which we’re invited “to find all asteroid threats to
human populations” and figure out what to do about them. </p>
<p>
And — this is good news, people — we’ve already pinpointed about 95
percent of all the rocks in the solar system that are of planet-mashing
size. </p>
<p>
I know that you are now instantly focusing on the remaining 5 percent,
as well as the multitudinous smaller fellows that are capable of taking
out Massachusetts or Paris — or your local shopping center. Everybody is
in favor of finding them too, particularly since one grazed Russia
earlier this year, causing the House Science Committee to hold a special
Threats From Space meeting. </p>
<p>
Even members of Congress who pooh-pooh the peril of global warming
believe in the danger of global asteroid-exploding. I am thinking about
Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who heads — yes! — the House
Science Committee. And Sen. Ted Cruz, the top-ranking Republican on the
Senate Subcommittee on Science and Space, who demanded that we “do what
needs to be done” to prevent an asteroid from hitting the earth and
smashing into a major American city. Or a Canadian one. </p>
<p>
Despite all this cheerleading, there hasn’t been all that much money
spent on the mission. Discover magazine estimated that over the past 15
years, the United States had spent less money on asteroid detection
“than the production budget of the 1998 asteroid movie ‘Armageddon.’ ”
In which Ben Affleck won Liv Tyler but the earth lost Shanghai, much of
New York and Bruce Willis. But we were talking about capturing
asteroids. </p>
<p>
The question is what NASA should do during the really, really long
pre-Mars interlude. The White House wants to send an unmanned spacecraft
to capture a smallish asteroid, tow it back and put it into orbit
around the moon, where we could send astronauts to study it. This would
most definitely help us in the race to develop the best “capture bag,”
and there’s pretty wide agreement we would acquire some other useful
technology as well. </p>
<p>
“This would be the first time humans have, in some sense, rearranged the
solar system for their own purposes. So that’s exciting,” said Prof.
Tom Prince, director of the Keck Institute for Space Studies at the
California Institute of Technology. </p>
<p>
Not as far as the House of Representatives is concerned. The Science
Committee recently voted to cut all the money for asteroid capture and
invest it instead in a new moon landing. There were several objections
to the Obama plan, the main one being that it was kind of boring.
“Costly and uninspiring,” sniffed Chairman Smith. </p>
<p>
The White House position was that if you wanted to talk about boring, look at a moon landing. “Going back to the moon, <em>something we have done six times,</em> just does not seem to us worth the investment,” said Lori Garver, NASA deputy administrator, in a phone interview. </p>
<p>
And anyway, what about protecting the earth from a killer asteroid? I
believe I speak for all of us when I say that space exploration is good,
but not being hit by a large hunk of galactic rock is even better.
</p>
<p>
The House Republicans could have a point. The asteroid that NASA wants
to capture would be way smaller than Killer Visitor dimensions. Although
it does seem a little peculiar that they’re calling for a dramatic
moon-colony initiative at the same time they’re cutting the space
budget. </p>
<p>
It’s also conceivable that the Science Committee doesn’t like the Obama
plan because it’s the Obama plan. This has been known to happen in the
House. Perhaps we should be grateful it hasn’t voted to cancel the
asteroid-capturing program 40 times. </p>
<div class="">
<p>Nicholas D. Kristof is off today. </p> </div>
<div class="">
</div>
</div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br>
</div>