BraveNewWorld said:
In 2015 NASA is launching a rocket that will retrieve an asteroid and bring it into the Moon's orbit in 2019. If everything goes as planned then Americans will walk on an asteroid in 2021, but NASA's tentative timeline says 'before 2025'. NASA will then send Americans, and apparently a Brit (the Brits better redirect the cash they spend on the ESA to NASA for awhile...) to Mars in the 2030s. It's pretty amazing what NASA does with a budget consisting of belly button lint. They were granted 0.49% of the federal budget last year. That's the lowest amount of funds they've received from the feds since 1959 -- the second year of NASA's existence. (Yes, it took NASA a mere 11 years to land men on the Moon.)
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What? Where did you get this? The mission your taking about, asteroid retrievel, is only being studied. It would cost at least $2.5 billion to try to pull it off. The only asteroid mission currently being readied is Osiris Rex. On that mission, a robotic spacecraft is due to launch in 2016 on an Atlas 5 rocket.
After a year or so in space, it will rendevous with an asteroid, take a sample of it, and return that sample to Earth years later. Also, if the asteroid retrieval mission is ever approved and succeeds, it will only capture a roughly 500' diameter asteroid and place it into orbit around the Moon. It would be impossible to walk on such a small rock - it would have zero gravity. Hell, even the Moon, as big as it is, only has 1/6 of Earth's gravity.
