Listening to: Battery - Metallica

Space.com has some discussion of the idea of doing a quick manned dash to an asteroid - using the same mission hardware that is being designed for the moon missions.

“… a very natural, early extension of the exploration capabilities of this new vehicle architecture would be a ‘quick dash’ near-Earth asteroid rendezvous mission,” said Dan Durda, a senior research scientist in the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

“That kind of early demonstration mission might last no more than 60 or 90 days,” Durda said, “and take the crew no farther than a few lunar distances away from Earth.”

Durda said he could imagine that such a flight might be made before the first lunar landing even—perhaps after a lunar orbital mission or two—in order to try out spacecraft systems on an even longer-duration flight.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 19th, 2006 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.