re: #226 Anymouse 🌹

Apparently they’re not going to prevent it. (I’m not sure how you could anyway: For example a nuclear blast’s damage is caused by the shock wave, which wouldn’t happen in space. Suggestions have been made about throwing repeated inert objects at one point on an asteroid to deflect it’s orbit, but that would take a lot of missiles and has never been tested.)

It depends on how much warning you have. The preferred method would be to rendezvous with a spacecraft whose gravitational effect would very gradually change the orbit of the object.

Blowing it to smithereens with a nuclear device, like the public seems to want, would be worse than useless, causing many catastrophic impacts instead of just one.

Detonating a nuclear device at just the right distance would cause a thin surface layer to vaporize, creating a thrust that would accelerate the object enough to deflect its orbit, given enough lead time. You’d have to know whether it was a consolidated object or just a loose pile of gravel for that to work.

We have no launch vehicles suitable for any of these missions, and despite a lot of talk, there’s been precisely zero action on developing any—unless the Big Fucking Rocket turns out to be a real thing….