I'm John Batchel with my colleague and friend David Livingston, Dr. Space of the Space Show,

and we're very, very pleased to give an unlimited budget to Professor Planetary Science,

Richard Binzel. Richard, anything you want. Doesn't have to be asteroids, doesn't have to be

Earth. Where are you taking us, Richard?

Well, John, I'm a practical guy.

I think what I would want to do is establish a competitive NASA program.

We call it the planetary defense competition.

And we're talking a few hundred million dollars a year. That's

real money from real taxpayers. But what it would do is we would allow the best and the brightest

to compete for missions that would continue to discover asteroids that are coming near the earth,

and then begin to learn how to defend ourselves from them.

But even more importantly, how can we use them?

You know, we often talk about asteroids as foes,

but I think in the long term, the asteroids are our friends. The asteroids are friends, not foes, but I think in the long term the asteroids are our friends.

The asteroids are friends, not foes, because they may be used as space resources for

water, for thirsty astronauts, for metals and minerals and materials to build things in space.

Having things in space, using things in space means you don't

have to launch them off the Earth's surface. And so I think there are a lot of new and emerging

ideas that are out there waiting to come. I'd like to seed those ideas and really build a space

future or a space economy for the 22nd century.

A question about what I've read that there's a possibility that we could corral asteroids

and change their orbits to make them useful as mineral resources.

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