S8 Ep149: 1/4. The Genesis of the Asteroid Hunter Mission and Early Rejections — Dante Lauretta — Lauretta, hired by mentor Mike Drake at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), initiated the asteroid sample return mission concept in 2004 following a pivotal meet

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 1 December 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

1/4. The Genesis of the Asteroid Hunter Mission and Early Rejections — Dante Lauretta — Lauretta, hired by mentor Mike Drake at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), initiated the asteroid sample return mission concept in 2004 following a pivotal meeting with Lockheed Martin's Steve Price. The team submitted its initial proposal to NASA in July 2004, which received the agency's lowest competitive ranking, designated Category 4. A subsequent refined mission proposal targeting asteroid 1999 RQ36 was formally rejected in December 2007 due to prohibitively high estimated costs relative to the NASA planetary science program budget allocation.
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0:00.0	This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.
0:10.0	Here's John Batchelor.
0:12.0	I welcome Professor Dante Loretta, University of Arizona.
0:16.0	Most importantly, the author of a new book, The Asteroid Hunter,
0:20.0	A Scientist Journey to the Dawn of a new book, The Asteroid Hunter, a scientist journey to the dawn of our solar system.
0:25.0	Professor, congratulations, this is wonderful, but we get in a time machine and go to February of 2004, a clear day in Arizona.
0:34.1	You are an assistant professor at the time looking forward to tenure, and your good friend and boss, Mike Drake, calls you on your mobile phone and says, come on over here to the Arizona Inn and meet Steve Price from Lockheed.
0:51.0	That day begins a journey that we're just now illustrating in your new book. So what, who is
0:58.7	Steve Price? Who was Mike Drake? And what did you learn that day? Good evening to you.
1:03.7	Thank you, John. I'm thrilled to be here. Mike Drake was the director of the lunar and planetary laboratory
1:09.6	at the University of Arizona. And he was the one who hired me at that point about three years ago onto the faculty here.
1:17.7	LPL was founded by Gerard Kuyper, famous planetary scientist, really founded the field and was heavily involved in the surveyor and Apollo programs at the dawn of the American
1:27.8	Space Age. And the lunar planetary laboratory has been a training ground for young planetary
1:32.6	scientists throughout that time. So Mike and I were both cosmochemists, that is chemists
1:39.4	who study material from outer space, lunar samples, meteorites, comet dust. And we had bonded quite a bit
1:48.0	over those three years because of our shared scientific interest and our personalities just
1:52.2	really clicked. And he had taken me under his wing and he was my mentor and my dear friend.
1:57.6	And Steve Price was from Lockheed Martin. and he was the director of business development, and
2:03.5	recently had worked with LPL to win a mission called the Phoenix Marslander, which had been
2:09.3	awarded that year in 2004.
2:11.8	And Steve was there to recruit Mike, to be the principal investigator, which is the person in charge of these NASA
2:19.5	missions, has full authority for the scientific integrity, as well as managing the resources to
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