100 megaton bombs atop Saturn V rockets

On Thu, 08 Jul 2004 04:36:01 GMT, Scott Lowther
wrote:

Henry Spencer wrote:

The big question marks for deflection with nuclear bombs are how best to
turn a massive soft-X-ray flash (which is what you get out of a nuclear
bomb in vacuum) into propulsion,

It is not at all obvious that heating up the comet's surface with X-Rays
is the way to do it. Think Casaba Howitzer.

....And while it may be fun to take Missile Command to its ultimate
extension, I tend to agree with Henry that the only sane solution to
any real asteroid thread is deflection without breaking the damn
things up. Solar sail or gentle, continuous thrust may be the only
solutions that have a good chance of working, but again, as Henry
pointed out, the key is to detect them early enough. And, for that, we
need a good space-based detection platform that can work around that
nasty blind spot we call the Sun.

....Personally, the continuous thrust method would probably be the
first one implemented, as that's far simpler than a solar sail. After
all, to date we've done lots of orbital changes using thrust, but
AbZero in regards to the use of solar sails.

What ever *did* happen to that proposed solar sail demonstrator that
private group was working on a few years back?

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

A recent paper on the asteroid population of our neighbor Tau Ceti
suggests that any planet in the solar system would receive a bio-killer
impact every couple of thousand years, making evolution problematic.

It is interesting that in addition to planetary spacing and mass
distribution we now have to consider the asteroid population when
calculating the probability of extraterestrial life in a given star
system.

OM wrote:

...And while it may be fun to take Missile Command to its ultimate
extension, I tend to agree with Henry that the only sane solution to
any real asteroid thread is deflection without breaking the damn
things up.

Well, now, that's not strictly true, is it? Take it to an unlikely, yet
not wholly impossible extreme: an asteroid broken into chunks the size
of houses. This will be an interestingly large shotgun blast... absorbed
to a large degree by the atmosphere. Think of it this way: if you were
wearing a full-body Kevlar suit, which would you rather... to get struck
with a shotgun blast composed of two ounces of birdshot, distributed
over your chest... or a two ounce deer slug? The atmosphere serves as
the kevlar, absorbing much of the impact energy, if the cross-sectional
area of the impactor is greatly increased.


And mo while much will make it to the ground, the damage will be
spread out over a wider area... which is actually *good*.

The last thing the world needs is a massive asteroid strike that punches
through the crust. That will create worldwide devastation due to
geological upheavals and throwing teratons of molten rock into the sky.
If the blast is over a wider area, the penetration depths are much
lower, and *total* planetary damage is less.



So: yes, it would be far better to nudge a planet-killer impactor clean
off course so it misses Earth. But if, as is most likely, an impactor is
detected far too late to accomplish that... nuke the **** out of it.
Nuke it smart, try to push it away... but failing that, blast the
sumbitch to flinders. Gather all the nukes you can, shoot the Greenpeace
protestors, and start lobbing.

--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam
gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004 01:46:20 -0500, "Revision" wrote:

A recent paper on the asteroid population of our neighbor Tau Ceti
suggests that any planet in the solar system would receive a bio-killer
impact every couple of thousand years, making evolution problematic.

....Either problematic or at least accellerated, depending on the size
of the impactors as opposed to the numbers.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On Thu, 08 Jul 2004 07:02:54 GMT, Scott Lowther
wrote:

OM wrote:

...And while it may be fun to take Missile Command to its ultimate
extension, I tend to agree with Henry that the only sane solution to
any real asteroid thread is deflection without breaking the damn
things up.

Well, now, that's not strictly true, is it? Take it to an unlikely, yet
not wholly impossible extreme: an asteroid broken into chunks the size
of houses.

snip

....The problem there is twofold:

1) You have to make sure that the impactor is broken up into fragments
much smaller than houses. IMHO, about the size of a Yugo might be the
max size I'd deem acceptable. This would ensure that what comes down
doesn't make it all the way down.

2) And while not trying to sound like one of those antinuke
treehugging hippie radical perverted poofters, there is the issue of
all that irradiated debris winding up in the atmosphere. An LM RTG is
one thing, but an asteroid the size of a skyscraper gaining the
ability to glow in the dark once it's been nuked is another thing.


OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

Scott Lowther wrote:

Well, now, that's not strictly true, is it? Take it to an unlikely, yet
not wholly impossible extreme: an asteroid broken into chunks the size
of houses. This will be an interestingly large shotgun blast... absorbed
to a large degree by the atmosphere. Think of it this way: if you were
wearing a full-body Kevlar suit, which would you rather... to get struck
with a shotgun blast composed of two ounces of birdshot, distributed
over your chest... or a two ounce deer slug? The atmosphere serves as
the kevlar, absorbing much of the impact energy, if the cross-sectional
area of the impactor is greatly increased.


And mo while much will make it to the ground, the damage will be
spread out over a wider area... which is actually *good*.

No, it's bad, if the asteroid is sufficiently big. A good fraction
of the energy dissipated in the atmosphere gets radiated as heat,
and for a sizeable asteroid this would flash heat anything under the
impact region (of size up to an entire hemisphere) to ignition.

Paul

Scott Lowther wrote:
Henry Spencer wrote:


The big question marks for deflection with nuclear bombs are how best to
turn a massive soft-X-ray flash (which is what you get out of a nuclear
bomb in vacuum) into propulsion,


It is not at all obvious that heating up the comet's surface with X-Rays
is the way to do it. Think Casaba Howitzer.

.... which would deliver less total impulse than vaporizing a thick layer
of asteroid surface. Neutron or gamma irradiation might be even better,
since they will deposit energy to an even greater depth than soft xrays.

Paul

On Wed, 7 Jul 2004 21:40:00 +0200, "BitBanger" wrote:


"Elden" wrote in message
link.net...
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/175/1

Every nineteen years the large asteroid Icarus swings by planet Earth,
often
coming within four million miles of the planet astronomical terms.
Icarus last passed by Earth in 1997. Before that, its
previous approach was in June 1968. We now know that such near-Earth
asteroids are not all that rare and in recent years Congress and NASA have
shown greater interest in trying to track, and even visit them.


What the group decided to do was to take six Saturn V rockets then in
production, and with only minimal modifications to their payloads use them
to carry smaller bombs to Icarus. The first launch would have to take
place
by April 1968, only a year away, and five more launches would have to
follow
at two-week increments.

What is it with this f*cking infatuation with nuclear bombs!!! Why do they
keep wanting to blow up things when it has been shown many times before that
this is the wrong kind of solution. In fact, it could make things even
worse!


What would you suggest?????? A feather pillow???????????????????? Or
maybe that dumbass solar-sail idea like the guy in
Armageddon???????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????
That might work if we had ninety years to alter the friggin course AND
we had the technology TODAY, right NOW to make and deploy solar sails
miles across. We don't. A nuke is something we know how to do and
something we could throw together on short notice. It's the ONLY
thing in the tool box that has a realistic chance of effecting an
asteroid on short notice. There is no need for this unreasonable
terror you have for the word
"nuclear"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!

"Scott Ferrin" wrote an unbelievably large number of exclamation marks ...

"nuclear"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

IHNJ, IJWTS unbelievably large number of exclamation marks.

In sci.space.policy Henry Spencer wrote:

The big question marks for deflection with nuclear bombs are how best to
turn a massive soft-X-ray flash (which is what you get out of a nuclear
bomb in vacuum) into propulsion, and how well the object will hold up to a
fairly sudden shove. Even quite a loose object may be okay for *one*
shove if you can deliver the force to more or less an entire hemisphere,
e.g. with an explosion at some distance blowing off a surface layer.
A more localized shove, or multiple shoves, may be practical only for
objects with significant structural strength.


But isn't there a problem that un-even surface - and potentially angular
difference - could translate a large part of that blast into not changing
the orbit much but instead increasing spin?

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++