NASAs next vehicle designed to carry astronauts to space is set to launch early next month atop a trusty Delta 4 rocket for a crewless test flight. Current plans call for a piloted flight in the new Orion spacecraft in the mid-2020s, when the vehicle will ride atop a new NASA heavy-lift rocket to take astronauts beyond Earth orbit for the first time in a half-century. Whats far less certain in the postspace shuttle era is where theyll go from there.

If the Obama administration and NASA have their way, the astronauts will be visiting a small asteroid that will have been nudged by a solar-powered robotic probe into a high, stable lunar orbit. During the monthlong mission the astronauts will rendezvous with the asteroid, perform spacewalks to gather samples and then return to Earth. The target asteroid has yet to be announced and a robotic space tug has yet to be built but NASA hopes to have the space rock relocated to the moons vicinity as soon as 2021.

NASA calls this complex concept the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) and bills it as the first crucial step toward human missions to Mars in the 2030s.

Others arent so sure. In June of this past summer the National Research Council issued a report stating ARM could divert US resources and attention from more worthy missions. A month later NASAs Advisory Council criticized ARM as a dead-end element on the path to Mars. The harshest criticisms of all surprisingly came from asteroid scientists who voiced their discontent via statements from NASAs Small Bodies Assessment Group, calling ARMs science not compelling. Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute, blasted ARM in September while testifying to a congressional committee, saying that NASAs cost estimate of less than US$1.25 billion for the robotic component of the mission strains credulity.

NASA

One option would involve sending a robotic probe to snatch a piece of rock from a large asteroid.

Im not a big fan of human space exploration as performance art, which is what ARM is, Sykes says. Because the problem with performance art is that your next trick has to be bigger than your last trick and that quickly gets unsustainable. ARM will never be funded. It will never happen. Its a waste of money. It doesnt advance anything and everything that could benefit from it could be benefited far more by other, cheaper, more efficient means.

Michele Gates, NASAs program director for ARM, says that the mission concept is meeting its developmental milestones and that an independent cost assessment study is underway. She and other NASA officials note that the advanced propulsion required for ARM would be enabling technology for a broad range of future missions and that ARM would be a crucial test for many deep-space activities crucial for someday reaching Mars. And it would do all this while keeping astronauts sufficiently close to home so that if something goes wrong, they could attempt an emergency return to Earth.

Last year, when the National Research Council released their report, we had very little detail on the ARM concept while their technical panel was doing their analysis, Gates says. Given the amount of work that has been done in the past year, and the positive reception weve received from so many communities to our most recent sharing of results, I would encourage everyone to look at the latest data.

ARMs fortunes now appear more fragile than ever, and its fate may have already been sealed by this years midterm elections, in which Republicans opposed to the mission took control of Congress. Still, NASA plans to conduct a formal review of the ARM concept in February 2015, and the Obama administrations next budget proposal is expected to request more funding for ARM, its signature effort in human spaceflight.

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NASA's plan to visit an asteroid faces rocky start