 NASA has chosen their path forward to explore and redirect near-Earth asteroids. This is your space pod for March 26, 2015. Ex-United States President George W. Bush initiated the constellation program in 2005 with the purpose of sending humans back to the moon. After the Augustine Commission found that the program was over budget, behind schedule, and unsustainable, in 2010 current President Barack Obama cancelled the constellation program and proposed a new direction for NASA to go to a near-Earth asteroid and eventually to Mars. Elements of the constellation program survived, such as the Orion capsule and the Aries 5 rocket, which was cancelled but reborn as the space launch system. As time has passed and new methods for detecting near-Earth asteroids have been utilized, NASA has developed a program called the Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM, which is under the umbrella of a larger program, the Asteroid Initiative. After carefully reviewing proposals on how to achieve their goals, they have selected the method of asteroid retrieval they would like to move forward with. They have chosen to extract a large boulder from a larger asteroid in favor of capturing an entire small asteroid. Using this method, not only would it be easier to move such a boulder into lunar orbit, but they would also be able to move or redirect the parent asteroid through a technique called a gravity tractor. Although, unfortunately, it's not some sort of futures to start Trek Tractor Beam. Oh, I wish it was. What is cool is that this technique takes advantage of mass and gravity to move an object into a desired path or orbit. The way it works is that all mass exerts and experiences gravity, and in space that effect is amplified, and even two small-sized objects can affect each other's motion. Thus, if a spacecraft rendezvous with an asteroid and assumes a halo orbit in just the right direction, that spacecraft could slowly pull an asteroid without even touching it. This technique becomes even more effective if that spacecraft has already retrieved a large boulder and increased its own mass. After performing the gravity tractor maneuver, the spacecraft and boulder would travel to a stable orbit around the moon where it would later be intercepted by and docked with an Orion capsule carrying two astronauts who would collect samples of the boulder before returning to Earth. So far, the only official crewed mission on an Orion capsule scheduled is the first crewed flight test of the Orion in 2021, following the first launch of the space launch system currently scheduled for 2018. NASA has stated that to reach the goal of sending humans to an asteroid by the mid-2020s, they would need to launch the robotic spacecraft by 2019 and keep the price fixed at or below $1.25 billion. One of the factors that is influencing the price and timeline of this mission is NASA's plan to use solar electric propulsion on the robotic spacecraft. Solar electric propulsion is ion thrusters that has its propellant ionized by solar power rather than nuclear power. The configuration they're planning to use on this spacecraft would be able to test and validate such a propulsion system to the point where they could start using solar electric propulsion on many future exploration missions. A lot of people think that we should go back to the moon first, myself included, but I do think that this mission is pretty cool. When I first heard that we were only going to be grabbing a large boulder from a much larger asteroid, I thought that that was just silly. But after learning more about this, I do think that this is pretty awesome and especially being able to take advantage of nature and science and physics in this way to redirect some of these larger near-Earth asteroids out there, I think that that's awesome and it's something that we need to do eventually anyway if we plan on continuing to live here on Earth for the next couple of hundred or thousands of years to come. But anyway, in other news, we saw three successful orbital launches yesterday. United Launch Alliance launched the 9th Block 2F GPS satellite for the United States Air Force on a Delta IV rocket. Japan launched the IGS optical 5 imaging satellite for Japan's military on an H2A rocket. And Kosmotras, a joint company between Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, successfully launched the CompSat 3A satellite. It's an imaging and information satellite for South Korea on a Dnieper rocket. The CEO of Kosmotras stated that they would fulfill their commitments of launching foreign spacecraft on the Dnieper rocket, which equals to about three more launches of the rocket this year, despite earlier reports that Russia was pulling out of the Dnieper program. Speaking of Russia, Roscosmos has officially announced their intention to restart tourist flights to the International Space Station by 2018 on their Soyuz capsules. This is due in part to losing NASA as a customer, because hopefully NASA astronauts will be riding on commercial crew vehicles by then. Anyway, I would love to know what you think about NASA's plan to capture, redirect, and visit an asteroid. And don't forget to subscribe to our channel, and if you'd like to find out more information about how you can help us to bring you content like this, then please visit patreon.com slash tmro to find out more information about how you can become one of the citizens of tomorrow. Regardless of which path NASA's human spaceflight programs take, I am rooting for all of them, because the tomorrow I want to see is the one where we are exploring and expanding our human presence into the rest of the solar system.