Rusty Schweickart is a former astronaut and a veteran of four space shuttle missions. He was selected in 1978 by NASA to be part of a five-man crew for a mission to the Russian Salyut 7 space station. In 1982, when he was forty years old, Schweickart became the youngest American to fly into space when he piloted STS-9. In 1984, he was chosen as part of the crew for the Space Shuttle Challenger mission
In his four space flights, he logged more than six hundred hours in space and orbited the earth more than 500 times. He retired from NASA in 1994 and in 1998 received a call from president Bill Clinton to become the first civilian in space since 1972.
It would take an extremely large spacecraft to deflect a large asteroid that would be headed directly for the Earth.Rusty Schweickart
We have the capability - physically, technically - to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts. We are now able to very slightly and subtly reshape the solar system in order to enhance human survival.Rusty Schweickart
