Asteroid activists launch fund-raising campaign for space telescope
July 1, 2012
Leaders of the nonprofit B612 Foundation today took the wraps off a campaign to fund and launch a space telescope to hunt for potential killer asteroids — a campaign they portrayed as a cosmic civic improvement project.
Former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, the foundation’s chairman and CEO, estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars would have to be raised to fund the project, but said he was “confident we can do this.”
“We’ve been at this particular project for a year now,” Lu told me in advance of today’s campaign kickoff at the California Academy of Sciences’ Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco. “We have people who are internationally well-connected, and we have a message that we think resonates with people ranging from large donors to perhaps half a million kids worldwide.”\
