In five years or so, NASA will begin initiating the launch process for its Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM. It’s one of those scientific endeavors that has a clear goal, yet an unclear purpose. The goal of the mission is to send a robotic probe off to a near-Earth asteroid, find a small boulder somewhere between one and two dozen feet in diameter sitting on the surface of the asteroid, pick it up, and transfer it to the moon where it can be placed in a stable lunar orbit. In effect, it turns the asteroid into a kind of natural satellite.
Why, exactly, does NASA want to do something like this? No one is completely sure. ARM is meant to be part of a slew of missions test out the capabilities of the Orion spacecraft and NASA’s new Space Launch System. Together, both systems will help NASA conduct more and more crewed operations into the farther reaches of space, eventually culminating in successfully getting astronauts to Mars before 2040.
As I’ve written before, there’s a good chance the purpose of ARM is to simply prove that it’s possible to use robotic technology to haul a big payload off an asteroid (or other object) and successfully move in into another moon or planet’s orbit. This could be critical for several reasons. One is that it helps establish orbits as a form of possible storage space that humans could access above the ground, allowing rocket launches off the ground to be conducted with less fuel and energy costs.
Another reason with bigger ramifications is that asteroids themselves could play an important role as reservoirs of natural resources like certain metals and even water. The SPACE Act of 2015 sets the stage for private companies to begin exploiting those objects and keeping ownership over what they find. Imagine we’re able to improve spaceflight technology to the point where water or other elements commonly found in space can act as a propellent. Suddenly, any celestial rock that can be mined becomes a miniature oil field, usher in a new interstellar gold rush for precious resources every single nook and cranny in the solar system having an asteroid.
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