JonathanDunbar
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Never mind its in the RSS feed. I asked the mods to delete it.
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There's a big difference between making a space-related announcement and actually doing it. The Russians haven't actually done anything about Apophis.Never mind its in the RSS feed. I asked the mods to delete it.
Or, how would North America feel if the Russians "delayed" a small object impact by 12 hours so that the multi-megaton equivalent event happened over NA instead of Northern Asia? Or vice-versa?
Do you do a preemptive strike to prevent someone from attempting a deflection if you think the results will be worse as a result of the deflection? Do you argue it out in court beforehand?
So what? and where does it say the Russians are going to destroy it? So would you rather die?
And who is 'us'? not everyone who uses this forum/internet is American you know that right? There is Russian rocketeers, and IIRC use/used this forum.
Do you think their control screen will look anything like this?
John's right, talk is cheap.
And it is easy to say "we'll move it" or "we'll destroy it" but a lot of people argue that you're much more likely to make things worse.
What if it was really going to miss and you move it and now it hits?
Or, how would North America feel if the Russians "delayed" a small object impact by 12 hours so that the multi-megaton equivalent event happened over NA instead of Northern Asia? Or vice-versa?
Do you do a preemptive strike to prevent someone from attempting a deflection if you think the results will be worse as a result of the deflection? Do you argue it out in court beforehand?
Frankly, I'd love to see an "impact hazard" be turned into a government subsidy to have private enterprise develop the technology to mine the object with a requirement that any tailings be dealt with.
Maybe the mods here should think about setting up a section for international users as it would be a great way to exchange information and ideas from rocketeers all over the world!
Jonathan,
Please be careful of your national prejudices.
This is (and always has been) an international forum and not just an American one. Just look at user identifiers in the upper right corner of each post. Chrisn is from New Zealand, Wik (one of our Admins) is from the UK, a whole PILE of folk from Canada (including vendors), and there are regular visitors from Australia and Bulgaria among others. Shoot, There's even a bunch of folk from California which is probably more alien to us Midwesterners than some of the others.
All of us are justifiably proud of our countries and each of us had reason to think our is the best and each of us is concerned about the problems that we see at home.
This is not the place to beat the drum for one country over another if it is done in a way that is offensive to those whom we have come to regard as friends.
Will,
I would GLADLY subsidize a government plan to defend planet Earth from all space threats; this includes asteroid/comet impacts and invasions of E.T.'s.
The planet is woefully unpreparied for planetary invasion! We can BARELY defend our streets, how the HECK are we going to defend our skies!!!
Jonathan
Russians to destroy Asteroid ... they beat us yet again
be it USA, UK, Canada, Etc, eventually all our rocket parts will be made in China
be it USA, UK, Canada, Etc, eventually all our rocket parts will be made in China
"Russian technology, American technology, it's all made in TAIWAN!"
https://xkcd.com/679"im not looking at it so its not there"
if you want to keep your limbs intact when firing your rockets, i recommend against it. they would would switch the tempered aluminum stock against annealed stock to save two cents without thinking about it twice
https://www.sankakucomplex.com/2010/01/01/shanghai-bridge-made-of-rubbish-collapses/
a whole PILE of folk from Canada (including vendors),
Jonathan
This is a very old idea going back at least to the early 70s. I'm in the business and I remember in the late 70s we (our company and the US government) were investigating the feasibility of deorbiting space debris and errant space junk with high power lasers, and to propel rockets and spacecraft with lasers for the government. The short answer was that we and other researchers demonstrated that while it could be done, the technology to build multi-gigawatt lasers required for the job did not exist, and would not exist in the foreseeable future.
Using lasers would actually be the cheapest way to go, but it ain't going to happen, and while many books and movies have been made on the subject, none have addressed the fundamental problems with the basic concept of destroying asteroids that may impact earth. What happens if we break it up or change it's trajectory and where does the debris go?
While we can assign asteroid-earth collision probabilities based on the known orbital parameters, the predicted orbits are only as good as your observations. This particular asteroid has been studied for several years, and now the best information is that the asteroid will miss earth by 18,000 miles or so. If we did have the means to break up this asteroid, which we do not, and which no one will have in the foreseeable future, we still would not be able to predict with any certainty where the debris would go, The same holds true if we attempted to alter it orbit, and indeed we could then cause a collision that would otherwise not have happened.
There is no way the Russians, or anyone else, can design, build and deliver any manned, or even unmanned spacecraft to an asteroid for $300,000,000 from scratch. That's probably about the cost of a design study to define the problem. To design and build an unmanned spacecraft large enough to deliver a nuclear payload that might be capable of altering the orbit of, or breaking up an asteroid would require 10 years and 30 billion dollars if you can use existing boost vehicles and existing nuclear devices. If an unmanned non-nuclear device were used, you're now in the 500 billion dollar range and a 20 year time frame because no one has launch vehicles large enough for the task nor the hardware to destroy or move an asteroid.
Pushed to the absurd, if you want a manned mission, your above 1 trillion dollars because not of the technology to support this type of mission exists or is even on the drawing boards.
Even worse, after spending all that money, you could not be assured that you would not send an asteroid into a collision course with the earth on a later orbit, because we would have no idea how the device would actually alter the long term orbit.
It's a nice topic for science fiction, but reality is quite different, and for what it's worth, IMO we have better, and much more important things to spend our money on than to worry about a catastrophic interplanetary collision.
Bob
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