Inside NASAs New Spaceship for Asteroid Missions

The re-election of President Barack Obama has kept NASA on track to send human explorers to an asteroid, and that means work on a 21st-century spacecraft to fly astronauts to the target space rock and hover nearby or maybe even pogo off its surface will go ahead as well.

As of 2010, Obama has challenged NASA to get astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, and on to Mars by the mid-2030s. Whether or not the space agency can stick to that schedule largely depends on its future budget, experts say, but regardless of the pace, work on the asteroid mission is already under way.

The Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (SEV) is a prototype that began its design life as a wheeled moo…
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