Darn, that's so boring! It's much more exciting when there's a chance, however slim, of global disaster and stuff. Don't you think?

So a treasure trove of minerals at the top of a gravity well is going to float on by and not a single government space program will attempt to place it in a stable orbit for economic and scientific access. Heck, I bet they never even considered such a venture.

It's just as well - they'd probably screw it up somehow.

Hm, placing an awfully-fast rock with a very serious amount of momentum into stable orbit? Not a trivial undertaking. It would probably be cheaper on fuel to fly one over from the asteroid belt.

Asteroid belt is further away in terms of delta-V.
On the other hand, there are at least a couple 100m+ nickel-iron NEAs within 1000 m/s of the top of our well. It would be more work to bring 'em down to a useable depth than to capture them.

Trouble is, every time I read about "giant lump due to hit earth" I think it just refers to another visit to the UK by Michael Moore

Man, is it wrong to have hoped that it going to hit?

Well, maybe, but it's not wrong to hope it would have looked close enough to spur some action.

Damn! I can stop revising my post-apocalypse SF collection, e.g Day of the Triffids (Wyndham), Footfall, Lucifer's Hammer (both Niven), and the latest one not previously read for some reason, The Alien Years (Silverberg)...
An OT comment, and I know this sounds paranoid, but it's widely believed on the basis of known UK government disaster planning that one of the first things to happen if something like an asteroid strike was imminent is that the police nationwide would be instructed to collect all the licenced weaponry possessed by UK citizens. Go figure, as I believe the trans-Atlantic saying is.

James, 2003 QQ47 cannot be easily captured into orbit about the earth- it has *very* high velocity relative to the earth, inclined over 60 degrees to the ecliptic! See
for a visualization.

Dishman has it right- what matters is not distance, but delta-V needed to retrieve an object. There are hundreds of better candidates out there.

Doug

Ack, the post lost the url for the orbit simulator. Try the link on my name below.

Crap. I had just started to use this impending disaster to justify a bump-up in my ammo stock...you know, you can't be too prepared when an asteroid is plummeting to earth. Now I have to get a whole new set of excuses.

BTW Doug/Jeff: I've not been ignoring XCOR in my X-ship postings lately, it's just that you've not had any public statements for a long time and although I am aware of some very non-public things, I can't print that. Feed me data!