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Nukes to Stay for At Least Another 117 Years

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posted on Mar, 11 2018 @ 04:15 PM
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originally posted by: Spacespider



Just because these plans now exist does not mean the spacecraft will ever get built. NASA scientists declined to give a cost estimate for a mission, citing the sensitivity of pricing information


While they having a bright Idea.. we could get blown to bits..

Get to work NASA !


youre NASA for crying out loud....youre genius's im sure you got a roomfull of guys thinking crap up,and another set backing them up.You telling me that these boyscouts are the worlds hope? Jeezus.



posted on Mar, 11 2018 @ 04:57 PM
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a reply to: swanne

isn't it like in every "nuke the asteroid" storyline in tv and movies.. that nuking it actually makes things MUCH WORSE?



posted on Mar, 11 2018 @ 08:25 PM
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Um, just a moment.

Nuclear weapons are “valued”, if you will for their ability to produce enormous explosions; just the the thing to shatter, vaporize, or, at least deflect, potentially life-ending asteroids before they can hit our Earth.

Or could they?

Let’s consider the primary effects of a nuclear detonation. There are three: the blast (propagated by the shockwave), the intense heat, and high energy radiation.

Everyone seems to be assuming that an asteroid speeding through the vacuum of space would be as vulnerable to the intense crushing shockwave of a nearby nuclear blast as large building might be.

But in space, there is no air to propagate the shockwave from a nuclear blast, the blast effect would be significantly less for any given yield when compared to what would be expected on Earth.

Unless you expect to launch the equivalent of a Tsar Bombe at an extinction-level asteroid, don’t expect to have much “impact”!

Heat is another factor reduced by the lack of air in space. Yes, nuclear detonations produce enormous amounts of heat, but heat does not conduct well in a vacuum. If detonated on the surface of an asteroid, you might get some relatively minor melting, temporarily.

And radiation, not very effective against an asteroid that has been bathed in radiation (cosmic rays) it’s entire life.
edit on 11-3-2018 by Bhadhidar because: (no reason given)



posted on Mar, 11 2018 @ 09:04 PM
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a reply to: swanne

I am no physicist, but geeze .... in a no or low gravity environment a nuke would NOT be necessary to divert an incoming asteroid !!
Heck yeah, we oughta have a space craft with a device (rail gun, laser) to thump an incoming object away from the earth. Get going on that tech, NASA.



posted on Apr, 5 2018 @ 05:30 AM
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Steve Hench, Former Scientific Staff Member at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has this to say:



It depends on the size, mass, composition, trajectory, and amount of lead time. The problem with using nuclear weapons is that they produce a rather large but short-term impulse. As an analogy, imagine a paper grocery sack that is full of heavy items. We must pick it up in just the right way, and not to quickly, or we’ll tear the paper. We don’t want to “stop” the asteroid, and we don’t want to blow it into a lot of little pieces, either.

What we want to do is to change its velocity so that its projected trajectory no longer intersects with the Earth’s.

In general, some number of small pushes would be better than one push, and the longer ahead of time, the more a small change in velocity has on the trajectory. So, if nuclear explosions are to be used, more than likely it would be a series of fairly small ones, at intervals, to provide a series of impulses with minimal damage to the asteroid, and also to allow time to evaluate the effects on the trajectory.

One thing that must be considered is that the thrust vector must be directed through the center of gravity, and in the desired direction.

In addition, asteroids have some rate of tumble, which can be very complex and means that anything placed on the surface of the asteroid must take that into consideration—a daunting challenge indeed, because the timing of an impulse would be critical and have only certain moments of opportunity.

Detonation of the device(s) some distance away in the right direction from the asteroid would reduce the effect on the asteroid’s tumble rate, but it would also greatly affect the overall amount of impulse effect. This is because impulse is the product of mass and velocity. The nuclear device, in and of itself, including the spacecraft carrying it, contains very little mass, albeit at a very high velocity.

However, the radiation energy impinging on the asteroid would heat up the surface and cause matter to be ejected, resulting in thrust, but the control of the direction would be very complex. The bottom line is that the reaction mass needed to influence the trajectory of the asteroid must come from somewhere, and that is going to have be from the asteroid itself. Hence the device must be a surface-based “groundburst,” so that the ejected mass (perhaps thousands or even millions of tons) produces the necessary thrust, and again at the precise time and location to have the desired effect.


Everything he says makes perfect sense. This is echoed here by ATS members with some scientific knowledge. As this is a conspiracy site, I'll indulge a little - it's very rare I voice theory, but here goes.

I like shooting pool and playing snooker occasionally. It's an incredibly skillful game. Imagine trying to cue your shot if the object ball were moving. Tricky. With an asteroid, we probably don't have the luxury of an equal sized cue ball either. Hitting asteroids repeatedly with nukes seems unworkable and assumes we have all the time in the world.

Nature generally has the upper hand in all of this. When she decides to call time, we all become passengers. We might luck-out and destroy or deflect some potential impactors in our time, if we develop some tech in time to do so, but - we simply don't get to see them all. We have impactors from 'out of the sun' - like the Russian one that nobody saw coming. Had it been much bigger.....

In the meantime, putting a platform into space that can launch multiple nuclear weapons is......only really 'excused' if we place it there under the guise of an 'asteroid' defence system. This will concern other powers, who in turn will place their 'asteroid busters' into space.

Going back to snooker/billiards/pool - perhaps if we accelerate a mass to hyper velocities we can hit offending asteroids multiple times to good effect. But over the huge distances involved, how would we be sure to impact the asteroid so the thrust vector intersects with the asteroid's centre of gravity? Rail guns are huge, require a lot of power and would need to be in space to have any sporting chance of working.

With our current tech, it's rail guns or nukes - we would have to solve some pretty challenging problems to get either option to help prevent extinction level events, whilst avoiding destroying ourselves with the technology we develop! LOL!

What a catch 22, eh?



posted on Apr, 12 2018 @ 10:10 PM
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originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: swanne


NASA, in association with NNSA and several other departments, have just announced an official governmental plan to use nuclear heads to "protect against asteroids".

Thats not a viable option. The object may fragment, come at us in shotgun spread pattern, actually increasing the odds of something hitting us, not lessening it.


You don't impact the nuke with the surface, that would be silly for the reasons you say. You explode it somewhat off to the side, and the x-ray flux ablates a bit of the surface on one side, which pushes back against the asteroid in the other direction.

If the asteroid is nickel iron, you're good to go.

Still it's better to land a long-term ion engine a few years ahead and steer and plan the intervention so you can adjust.



Image source




posted on Apr, 12 2018 @ 10:13 PM
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originally posted by: Bhadhidar
And radiation, not very effective against an asteroid that has been bathed in radiation (cosmic rays) it’s entire life.


The physics of this is pretty well known to people who do this for a living. It's "project orion" over again. You can make nukes with enhanced soft X-ray radiation (was done for Safeguard missiles). X-rays boil a little bit of surface making a reaction effect.

It would be better to do it with a significant number of small impulses so the result could be checked after each one and adjusted.



posted on Apr, 12 2018 @ 10:14 PM
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originally posted by: 5StarOracle
I dont see nukes as the best solution to suck a problem...

What would be wrong with a space craft that could attach itself to an incoming body and with thrust alter it's path?


Nothing, other than difficulty, expense, energy source and fuel for momentum transfer. If you can over come those, then it's a better solution.



posted on Apr, 12 2018 @ 10:40 PM
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Cant beat hollywood science



posted on Apr, 12 2018 @ 10:41 PM
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originally posted by: mbkennel

originally posted by: 5StarOracle
I dont see nukes as the best solution to suck a problem...

What would be wrong with a space craft that could attach itself to an incoming body and with thrust alter it's path?


Nothing, other than difficulty, expense, energy source and fuel for momentum transfer. If you can over come those, then it's a better solution.

We need to rick and morty that #



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