By picking the shape and trajectory, we can have quite good accuracy on where to land the debris. Pick a piece of federal desert land and there you go.

Seriously, the scenario as I understand it is: we'd park an asteroid in a high orbit

Bad assumption right from the beginning. That's a terrible waste of energy. You mine an earth-crossing asteroid. Chunks mined off an earth-crossing asteroid can be put onto an earth-intersecting trajectory with only the tiniest of delta-V (you might have to wait a long time your payloads, but no problem there). The amount of delta-V is so low (dozens to hundreds of m/s) that you wouldn't even need to use a rocket, you could just kick it off with a railgun or similar. Then you don't brake it when it gets to earth - it brakes itself by crossing through Earth's atmosphere ("aerocapture"). There are various optional things one could do with the reentry chunks to assist, such as small rockets for trajectory adjustment en-route or small high-speed chutes to keep the asteroids from completely obliterating themselves on reentry / landing (no need for a soft landing, it's fine for them to hit moving at hundreds of meters per second). Both of these would be dwarfed orders of magnitude over by the mass of the return chunk.

All you, as a mining operation, need to do is get your operation up to the asteroid. You need to be able to mine off chunks, shaped appropriately for optimal reentry, and kick them off onto an ideal reentry trajectory toward your target impact zone - potentially with the various hardware systems described as above, but in the base case, not with anything at all. You need a source of power (solar, nuclear) for mining and to kick your chunks into their Earth-intercept trajectory. And of course you have to deal with a million and one details, starting with how to mine at all in microgravity and what targets would actually have commercially viable quantities of valuable minerals.

Which is why you send as optimal of a size and shape as possible. Note that asteroids normally come in randomly and have random shapes. Humans can have a huge impact on the behavior by choosing an optimal shape and trajectory. And, as mentioned, drogue chutes could be used to further reduce the free fall velocity - not for a gentle impact, simply to keep the velocity down to a level that it won't completely obliterate itself in the atmosphere or on impact.

Yeah, but experience with gigantic hypersonic parachutes is also rather limited.

Again, it's really doubtful that there's any show stoppers here. But there's a lot that needs to be done before you can bet a whole mission on these sort of things. There's many thousands of little details that could kill the crew if they go wrong, so the odds of any one doing so must be kept to the tiniest fraction of a percent.

I think you need a new tinfoil hat.

If the VPN traffic is encrypted properly, and they don't have access to either end point, how is it you propose they crack it? Magic?

If there is a vulnerability in the software, which that delightful OpenSSL bug provided (thank goodness I stuck with Debian 6 so long) then you have a point. But not even the NSA, as the article makes clear, has some means to break into a properly encrypted stream.

Largely because if the article, despite /.'s hysterical headline, states that well configured encryption systems remain secure. And how exactly is the NSA going to crack into my self-signed certs, with the CA sitting on a box with no connection to the Internet? Short of breaking into the location where the computer is, I'd say with reasonable certainty that the NSA cannot crack the certs that are used for my interoffice VPN. Now maybe the VPN software has a vulnerability, and that is always a a worry, but the actual implementation itself is as sound as I can imagine it being.

If the encryption is properly implemented, I'd say it is highly unlikely that they will crack it any time soon.

Properly configured systems with a well-implemented certificate infrastructure are very hard, if not outright impossible, to inject a MITM attack into.

Before we all get too hysterical, from the article itself:

The digitization of society in the past several decades has been accompanied by the broad deployment of cryptography, which is no longer the exclusive realm of secret agents. Whether a person is conducting online banking, Internet shopping or making a phone call, almost every Internet connection today is encrypted in some way. The entire realm of cloud computing -- that is of outsourcing computing tasks to data centers somewhere else, possibly even on the other side of the globe -- relies heavily on cryptographic security systems. Internet activists even hold crypto parties where they teach people who are interested in communicating securely and privately how to encrypt their data.

In other words, the NSA, GCHQ and other intelligence services are probably only able to crack badly configured or unpatched and badly out of date systems. That doesn't stop them from using out of band vulnerabilities like hacking into someone's PC or forcing some online service to open up the decrypted data, but it seems likely that if you have a well-managed cert chain and your systems are kept up to date and patched, the odds of anyone, government or otherwise, busting into your encrypted data seems pretty low.

My big fear out of all this isn't the unlikely hacking of mainstream encryption schemes, but rather that those that do use encryption may end up being targets of other methods; like malware, to get at their critical data.

Except that your terminal velocity on Mars is orders of magnitude higher than on Earth. Decelerate to subsonic then fall and you'll be back supersonic in no time.

I'm sure this is possible to do, but it absolutely requires more research and testing.

How exactly would that happen? Isn't ballistic capture's main drawback that it's slower than a Hohmann transfer?

Isn't leaving crews drifting in space longer increasing one of the main challenges of a mars mission - crew survival in transit?

It's got to be better than New Jersey.

It costs more for the fuel to de-obit platinum safely than the value of platinum

Asteroids seem to deorbit pretty effectively on a fuel budget of zero.

Your return chunks of asteroid are their own ablative. Ideally you'd give them as optimal of a reentry shape and trajectory as possible, but you wouldn't brake them, you'd just aerocapture, and then give them just enough of a drogue chute that they don't disintegrate fully on impact.

Ted, more likely a Libertarian, the Right's useful idiots.

And "righties" only know one tired stupid joke they keep saying over and over again.

"Lefty lefty lefty lefty." All... Fucking... Day... Long...