All in a day's work: eat Chinese takeout, save planet Earth

A.C. Charania has a vision to protect your house from sudden attack. Not from rogue missiles from North Korea, but from wayward rocks hurtling toward Earth.

His plan: In case of an incoming asteroid, send an army of nuclear-powered robots called MADMEN to grab hold of the errant rock, drill into it, and use rail-guns with a nuclear charge to shoot buckets of debris into space and sway its trajectory. That way Earth could avoid the type of celestial collision that may have made dinosaurs extinct.

Seriously.

Call it Hollywood meets the Dixie rocketeers. Here in an Atlanta office building, a group of space futurists is devising ways to do everything from bounce objects off comets to send tourists to Mars. They're part of a new breed of space entrepreneurs fed by both NASA and a sense of Star Trek possibility.

Here at SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc., the small outfit where Charania works, artists' penciled visions leap out in chrome on black, and robots swarm toward a rocky asteroid. More science than fiction, the MADMEN (short for Modular Asteroid Deflection Mission Ejector Nodes) evolved from the idea of using swarms of diving robots to explore the ocean moon Europa.

Certainly there is a need for something to protect Earth. Some 2,700 "near-earth objects" careened by the planet in the last decade alone.

"We're asking people to dig a little deeper into their creative psyches and use their imagination to come up with new ideas," says Robert Cassanova, director of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, also in Atlanta. "We're not looking for technical details; we're looking for the grand ideas."

Charania and his comerades are part of a growing network of artistic engineers keen to "leapfrog" technologies that will bring space closer, faster. Their energy is due in part to private innovations like Mr. Rutan's X Prize-winning spaceship and a seven-year-old NASA seed effort to engage the minds of young Arthur C. Clarkes, daydreaming in the suburbs and sketching rockets in class.

Already, NASA is funding research into everything from growing vegetables on Mars to a "space elevator": a 62,000-mile flexible tube, held in place by centrifugal force, that would offer cheap and rocketless rides from the equator to the fringe of space. As NASA's focus shifts away from the space shuttle and space station over the next decade, many expect this kind of work to garner more attention, and plenty of funds.

Much of the conceptual work is taking place deep within aerospace firms and on college campuses from San Francisco to Raleigh, N.C. But SpaceWorks is a new model, trading bureaucracy for entrepreneurship in an enterprise where scientists do everything from propulsion calculations to making copies at Kinko's, and find time to attend Star Trek conventions, too.

SpaceWorks' glassy quarters off Atlanta's Perimeter Mall, alongside an H&R Block office, is decorated with the latest in stargazer chic: German moon maps from the 1800s, a top-of-the-line light saber, shiny Star Trek lunch boxes. The seven engineers stay up late over Chinese takeout, as keen to talk about eBay finds of space paraphernalia as the dynamics of inflatable modular habitats. "The mojo doesn't really start flowing until around 7 p.m.," says John Bradford, the wonky president of SpaceWorks.

To date, they've worked on everything from a military space fighter to a Martian telecom grid that would bounce off the tails of comets - imagining the practical use of space for everything from tourism to burials. While the work is mostly conceptual, it hews to the physical laws of the universe.

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