Yes, And here's some words from some other folks
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/09/11/russiachina.shtml
Now you might think it's NASA's role to play Lewis and Clark; and I won't disagree, but we can find out how valuable Mars is with a couple of rovers for about $2 billion total instead of $114 billion. Maybe we can go as high as $4 billion, say for 4 to 6 of them.
Ignoring for the time begin (and forever) your rather complete ignorance of differences in the shielding properties of different types of material ( Like I'm supposed to teach you a class on it here at the Habitable Zone?),
Here's a little math: Griffin has 64 fragments of comet SW3 heading back towards the Earth in 2022. It is his responsibility to deal with them, not mine.
caio knee men, Yebeny
E.P.