Comment Re:Astronauts are obsolete technology (Score 3, Interesting) 97
Rendezvousing with asteroids is actually really tricky, especially if you want to get the same one twice. Hell with astronauts--putting this boulder somewhere that we can reach it over and over again, even just with probes, is a real big win. Especially considering how the last asteroid mission went... I don't think astronauts are the important part of the equation so much as the lunar orbit part is.
Even then I'm wondering how easy it is to get this thing back to Earth surface intact. If it was tiny, then sure, stuff it in aerogel, but this thing is going to be somewhere on the order of 800,000 kilograms (napkin estimate)...that's almost half the mass that the Space Shuttle was when full of fuel, and one hell of a lot more than its payload-to-landing! Anything you wrap it in is going to wreck fine features of the surface when you decelerate--for scientific purposes, it's a lot more fragile than astronauts. You need to pickaxe parts off of it gently for transport and study. I'm not sure how good our teleoperated waldos are in practice, so...astronauts.