DigitalSpace this week released its design concept for a manned mission to a yet-to-be-named asteroid. The company created the concept as part of an internal NASA feasibility study intended to show that such a mission is possible with the new vehicles NASA is developing for a trip to the moon.

NASA is considering a visit to an asteroid only after the agency fulfills its current vision of returning to the moon and setting up a base there. But animations of an asteroid mission may have an unintended effect: By whetting the public appetite for going somewhere humans have never been, they may dim the already-feeble enthusiasm for what some have dubbed "Apollo 2."- Dawn Stover