The Importance Of Planning To A Space Program

Some folks at the University of Glasgow are proposing nudging some modest sized (90-100 ft diameter) asteroids into Earth orbit where that would be more conveniently studied and/or mined. This sounds to me like a swell idea and may well be a way to get past any future proposals to declare space to be like the oceans, "a common heritage of mankind". That common heritage crap is why no one is mining the oceans for the nearly unlimited supplies of various minerals to be found there as everyone from the UN to the Bumfarkistan Liberation Front would demand a piece of the action.

Of course there are the usual Luddites tut-tuting that if anything went wrong with this project, the asteroid might well wind up being mineable right here on earth. The solution is easy enough, as the proponents of the project are double-dome boffins who could plot the asteroids path to within a yard or so and thus guarantee that if something did go wrong, the resultant crater would be located somewhere where no real damage would be done. Of course what would likely happen is that the maths would be left to math majors who would assume that the project being Scottish, the weights would be in stone, and the distances in leagues.

Them being Scottish, they'd probably put London at the top of their list.