If you want some thrills and chills this Memorial Day weekend, try out Gregg Easterbrook's Atlantic Monthly cover story on space rocks.

Yes, space rocks:

Only in the past few decades have astronomers begun to search the nearby skies for objects such as asteroids and comets (for convenience, let's call them "space rocks"). What they are finding suggests that near-Earth space rocks are more numerous than was once thought, and that their orbits may not be as stable as has been assumed...Extrapolating from recent discoveries, NASA estimates that there are perhaps 20,000 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets in the general vicinity of Earth.

A generation ago, the standard assumption was that a dangerous object would strike Earth perhaps once in a million years. By the mid-1990s, researchers began to say that the threat was greater: perhaps a strike every 300,000 years. This winter, I asked William Ailor, an asteroid specialist at The Aerospace Corporation, a think tank for the Air Force, what he thought the risk was. Ailor's answer: a one-in-10 chance per century of a dangerous space-object strike.

Talk about ruining cookouts. In the article, Easterbrook makes global warming look like a cakewalk in comparison. NASA, meanwhile, devotes a minuscule segment of its $17 billion budget to researching the space rock phenomenon. Its other priorities?

Goals that were listed included "sustained human presence on the moon for national preeminence" and "extend the human presence across the solar system and beyond." Achieving national preeminence--isn't the United States pretty well-known already? As for extending our presence, a manned mission to Mars is at least decades away, and human travel to the outer planets is not seriously discussed by even the most zealous advocates of space exploration. Sending people "beyond" the solar system is inconceivable with any technology that can reasonably be foreseen; an interstellar spaceship traveling at the fastest speed ever achieved in space flight would take 60,000 years to reach the next-closest star system.

As Easterbrook points out, the next president will have the opportunity to reshape--and perhaps reprioritize--NASA's budget. Whether you buy "the sky is falling" argument or not, it's a hefty amount of money that could, in all likelihood, be better allocated.