NASA should drop plans to visit and establish an outpost on the moon, and instead should focus on something more practical: saving mankind from extinction by a killer comet or asteroid, according to one observer.

Gregg Easterbrook is contributing editor of The Atlantic and The New Republic, a fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, D.C., and author.

Easterbrook cites work by Columbia University geophysicist Dallas Abbott that shows many more large space objects such as meteors have struck Earth, some fairly recently in geological terms. But because the objects have smashed into the 70 percent of Earth covered with water, their craters haven’t been found.

Sleuthing, however, has discovered 14 giant undersea craters already, with the hunt just recently underway.

Easterbrook said the import of all this is unnerving: chances of a catastrophic space object strike on Earth may be as high as one in 10 in this century.

Therefore, he argues, NASA shouldn’t waste time exploring the moon, but instead should switch to figuring out how to deflect incoming space objects before they have an opportunity to strike the Earth and throw a cloud of debris into the atmosphere that would cause a nuclear winter.

The upshot of his recommendation would mean jettisoning development of the Orion space capsule, the crew exploration vehicle being designed and built by Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT].

But he argues that development should continue on the Ares rocket being designed to loft Orion into space. Various segments of the rocket are being contributed by The Boeing Co. [BA], Alliant Techsystems Inc. [ATK], and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, a unit of United Technologies Corp. [UTX].

Ares instead could become an ideal workhorse for venturing into space to head off approaching colossal space objects before they can strike Earth in a devastating disaster, Easterbrook states.

His argument in the June 2008 issue, a 6,000-word treatise, may be read in full at http://www.theatlantic.com on the Web.