Russian Meteor Highlights The Danger Of Space Funding Budget Cuts

Russian Meteor Highlights The Danger Of Space Funding Budget Cuts -
As hyperbolic as that may sound, it’s true: Asteroid 2012 DA14, the hunk of rock hurtling 17,000 miles above us today, wasn’t discovered until last year — too late to do anything about it, had it been on a collision course. According to comments from Ed Lu, a former astronaut and head of a nonprofit dedicated to protecting humanity from asteroids, “[w]e only know the locations and trajectories of about 1 percent of asteroids this size or larger [...] So for every one of these, there’s 99 out there we don’t know about.”