The ambitious plan to tow asteroids into lunar orbit was ultimately cancelled
In 2013, NASA proposed a mission that would have brought asteroids to us. The goal was to capture a boulder from a near-Earth asteroid and move it into lunar orbit for astronaut study. However, budget battles and political skepticism eventually brought this deep-space dream to a halt.
The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) was designed as a way to facilitate deep-space exploration without requiring a planetary landing. The mission concept involved using a robotic spacecraft to visit a near-Earth asteroid, retrieve a boulder several meters wide from its surface, and use a space tug to transport the fragment into cislunar space. Once in lunar orbit, astronauts traveling on an Orion spacecraft could visit the boulder to perform close-up studies and collect samples for return to Earth.
Despite its scientific promise, the mission faced significant political and financial hurdles. While the Constellation program was incorporated into ARM in 2013, the project struggled to maintain congressional support. Critics, including House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, viewed the mission as ill-conceived, doubting its necessity for the long-term goal of reaching Mars in the 2030s. Following a White House budget blueprint for fiscal year 2018 that called for its cancellation, NASA received a notice of defunding in April 2017, leading to an 'orderly closeout' of the program.
Although the mission was officially cancelled in 2017, its technical legacy persists. NASA focused on transitioning ARM's key technologies to other applications, such as the solar-electric propulsion system. This propulsion technology was slated to serve as a power propulsion module for the Deep Space Gateway outpost. Furthermore, the mission's objectives contributed to the success of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which demonstrated the capability to deflect asteroids, ensuring that ARM's contributions to planetary defense and human exploration were not entirely lost.
Source: Whatever Happened To The Asteroid Redirect Mission?
