Opinion: Put money in deep space

An asteroid some 1,000 feet wide -- about the size of a very large shopping center -- crossed Earth's orbit at not quite twice the distance of the moon last week. Astronomers consider it a very near miss, too close for comfort. Had it hit land, it could have taken out an area the size of France, Texas or the entire Northeastern megalopolis. On impacting at sea, it could have flooded lowlands around the world, killing millions.

That's the good news. The bad news is that astronomers who watch for potential killer asteroids didn't detect that one until two weeks before it grazed us. Had it been on a collision course, there would have been hardly enough time to evacuate hundreds of millions of people, let alone to make some sci-fi attempt to destroy it or nudge it aside. Significant asteroids have hit Earth before; one of them is considered to have exterminated the dinosaurs.

The $3.5-million that NASA spends annually to search the sky for dangerous asteroids wouldn't make a decimal place in the federal budget and doesn't look deep enough into space. Florida Today quoted astronomer David Morrison, a NASA expert, as explaining that as potentially lethal asteroids are easily seen only close to Earth, they will either be discovered decades in advance of impact, as they cross Earth's orbit, or much too late. "We would have either have decades of warning, or we would see the flash of light in the sky and feel the Earth start to shake," he said.

This is not a hypothetical danger. It is real. The question is when.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration proposes to spend unknown billions of dollars preparing a defense against the largely hypothetical threat of a missile attack from China, North Korea or some other nation that, inconceivably, would be undeterred by our existing capacity to annihilate it in retaliation. Wouldn't a few of those billions be better spent in deep space?

-- Martin Dyckman is an associate editor and editorial writer for the Times.

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