You're Nuts: Plan To Kidnap A Moon For Our Moon
Scientists at the Keck Institute for Space Studies are cooking up a plan to capture an asteroid and place it in our moon's orbit so it can have a little satellite of its own. Cute! Basically the idea is to send a specially designed spacecraft to go bag a tiny asteroid (like, 20-feet wide tiny), then drag it back to the moon. Think 'dragging my @$$hole roommate out into the street in a sleeping bag' but way more complicated.
A captive asteroid would be a lot easier to pick apart and study, not to mention land on. It wouldn't be astronomically expensive, either: at $2.6 billion, the plan's cost lands in the same ballpark as the Curiosity rover. All this could happen sometime in the 2020s, according to the plan.
I'm all for it, I just wish the plan was a little more aggressive. A 20-foot asteroid? That's barely big enough for me to plant a flag on. I say we go for something much larger. After all, if these are my tax dollars at work, I want something I can be proud of. That way, in the future when my grandson and I are out looking at the moon through a telescope I can say, "You see that asteroid there? I paid for that shit. But enough about space, you remind me a lot of your father. Get it? Because he was an accident and I bet you were too! *slapping knee* Now go fetch me a beer."
Photo Credit
Thanks to Cam, who agrees we should at least give ourselves one more moon before we start giving moons moons.
-
The Last Barfighter is an arcade game designed for Big Boss Brewing Company by the McKinney Ten Percent ad agency. It's a two-player fighting game that takes place in a biker bar (great place for fights btw) and rewards the winner with a cup full of beer. God I love playing g... / Continue →
-
Ahahahaha, that's how I stare too! This is the spaceship bunk bed built by a loving father for his five-year old son, Finn. The command center with all the buttons and switches is actually an old video switcher from a local TV station that Finn's dad's buddy pulled out of the... / Continue →
-
TO INFINITY AND -- I think I'm just going to sit down for a while. This is NASA's new prototype spacesuit, the Z-1. It makes the wearer look like Buzz Lightyear. Personally, I want a spacesuit that makes me look like a Big Daddy from Bioshock. That way aliens will think twi... / Continue →
