Asteroid Capture: NASA plans to drag space rock into lunar orbit"
Quote:
"This is the first chance humanity has to demonstrate with an asteroid of this size that we can move its orbit," Bolden said. "It will be tens of years before we can say we can protect the Earth from an impact. It won't happen in my lifetime as administrator, but this is the first step."
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That is a bit disingenuous, the top priority of the asteroid programs hasn't exactly been about saving the world from extinction level event impacts, rather, to expand commercial mining and extraction of valuable minerals. Moon rocks were relatively worthless, but asteroids can be big money.