Obama Administration, NASA Seeks Money To Capture Asteroid and Explore Space [Video]

Even with a smaller budget, NASA has some big plans-plans that include capturing an asteroid and starting space travel again within the next five years.

NASA unveiled plans Wednesday to present a $17.7 billion spending plan for 2014--roughly 1 percent lower than their current $17.9 billion--which is highlighted with plans to increase the organization's capacity to study asteroids in order to lower the risk of a massive space rock colliding with Earth.

That plan involves a mission designed to identify, capture, redirect and sample a small asteroid by sending an unmanned probe out into space in order to snare one and tow it into orbit around the moon in order for NASA astronauts to be able to study it.

"We are developing a first-ever mission to identify, capture and relocate and asteroid," NASA chief Charles Bolden said in a statement. "This mission represents an unprecedented technological feat that will lead to new scientific discoveries and technological capabilities and help protect our home planet. This asteroid initiative brings together the best of NASA's science, technology and human exploration efforts to achieve the president's goal of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025."

As CNN notes, the Obama administration has indicated that it wants to send astronauts into space in order to study asteroids by 2025--there is even a goal to send men to Mars by 2030.

The budget request issued by NASA also asked for another $20 billion to study near-Earth asteroids, which would double the current budget for that study. Asteroid proximity to Earth drew closer scrutiny after a nearly 150-foot asteroid passed within 18,000 miles of Earth. That same day, a 45-foot asteroid fell into southwestern Russia, which injured roughly 1,200 people.

Bolden warned that there would be critics of the program, but defended the proposal as being about to raise the bar for human exploration and helping NASA "protect our home planet and brings us closer to a human mission to an asteroid."

As USA TODAY notes, NASA has catalogued more than 90 percent of the closest asteroids posing the gravest threat to Earth, which are more than a half-mile wide and have orbits that bring them close to the planet.

However, there are some doubters who believe spending more money on asteroid and meteor detection techniques won't help Earth's chances of keeping safer from a falling asteroid.

"The problem is that even if they use more of these highly sophisticated observatories, they will not find very small projectiles, but on the other hand, the small projectiles are not very dangerous, and the opinion is that the larger ones or at least most of the larger ones are now known," Alexander Deutsch, a professor of planetology at the University of Münster in Germany, said Tuesday, as reported by Space.com.

Marcia Smith, a space policy expert from SpacePolicyOnline, also is skeptical, reasoning that a space telescope that spots nearby asteroids makes more sense, which would be followed up by robotic missions to take samples of the asteroids.

"I remain unconvinced that there is any need for humans to personally visit an asteroid. Robotic spacecraft operated by humans right here on Earth can do the job," Smith said.