Apocolypse narrowly averted last night

I can understand W's motivation but WTF???

 

Do you know the wastage in the semiconductor industry from the imperfections in crystals made in a gravity field?

One thing our nominial orbital efforts (skylab, mir, shuttle) has managed to accomplish is to show the benefit of microgravity materials in the semiconductor and biochemistry fields -- on a theoretical basis.

The biggest obstacle to production microgravity materials is the prohibitive cost of lofting the raw materials out of the gravity well.

An asteroid of raw materials in LEO would be worth its weight in unobtanium.

All that money and resources flying by, and people want to hide. Or blow it up.

Oh, and forget solar sails. A laser drill boring into the rock would blow vaporized rock out of the bore hole, providing small but constant thrust.

And the excavated caverns would be hugely better than the flying soda cans we call space stations: no flying space junk is going to puncture a couple of feet of rock.

--
For the Bruce Willis fans: "Armegeddon" had a perfect record: It didn't get one single technical detail right.

 

Ahh, the Ricambi Mission to Outta Space to get NLA Ferrari parts!

 

Ok, So i've been thinking about this and I figure that Just in case we can't get Bruce Willis to go to space again, and if Steven Tyler dies, cartoons hold the answer. We'll just get us a really big bowl, and when the astroid comes close, we'll just hold it up so the astroid goes into the bowl and loops around and right back out to space. This would be a very viable Missile Defense System as well. Screw the "Star Wars" system of the Reagen days, we'll have the new "Tupperware System". D@mn I'm smart!

 

Just shows you know nothing. Tuppaware won't hold up to the cosmic energies involved. You will need cast iron lined with Teflon.

 

Check your own damn facts Chicken Little.

As far as the Universe is concerned, we are in a tiny back water town with one flashing street light and guess what, that street is called Main Street.

Jupiter gets hit because it's massive and waaayyyy the hell out there. Part of it's job for us IS to be smashed in the teeth by anyhing that comes close. It is one of the best defenses we have.

The Earth is 4.5 Billion years old. How old are humans? Right, we have lived a very, very short life span so far and if something big enough was headed our way and it was large enough to destroy Earth, we wouldn't be able to do anything no matter how many sails we had.

Our 5,975,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes is holding up just fine so far.

Humans will destroy the Earth long before any big ass rocks land here.

A 1 kilometer wide object that weighs about 200 lbs per cubic foot traveling at 20 kms per second could impact this planet with a force approximately 15 times larger than the world's whole nuclear weapons stash. An object about 1/3 that size going about 3 times faster will have about the same impact.

The Near Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California keeps track of short distant objects. I would be more worried about the long distance objects as the usually travel much faster, can be much smaller and still do more damage. NASA plans to start keeping track of long distance objects in the next 2 or 3 decades. The warning of LDO's could be as much as a year, depending on speed.

"A long-period object by definition may not have any records of sightings in written history," said Mazanek. "If it came back into the solar system and it was on [an Earth-bound trajectory], we would not have much warning." - Dan Mazanek, an engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

Also, if you are going to be afraid of things hitting us, be a fraid of things closer and more recent like asteroid 2002 EM7. It came within 500,000 kms of earth {300,000 miles}, a little farther out than the moon, and it was about 200 feet wide.

"""Asteroid 2002 NT7, detected on July 9 in New Mexico, could strike earth on Feb. 1, 2019. Although once there is more data on its orbit, it could turn out that it will not hit earth. This asteroid has an orbital period around the sun of 837 days and 1.2 miles wide, giving it enough kinetic energy to be a doomsday asteroid. This asteroid is large enough do wipe out most of mankind. And a very dangerous asteroid about a half-mile wide (2002 NY40) passes by earth at 330,000 miles out on August 18, 2002. So it passes by earth at a bit farther out than the distance to the moon. If it did strike earth it would not be an ELE Extinction Level Event (ELE), but the impact and explosion could cause a major decrease in the human population and giant tidal waves that would swamp the coasts of the earth's continents.
And there are probably a lot of similar small asteroids that will pass close to earth, but they are unknown now and will likely only be noticed as they get close to earth. It could be that our solar system is now entering a region of space that is full of a lot of comets and meteors, so an earth collision soon could be more likely. What is needed is a major international effort to determine the orbits of small asteroids that could come close to earth, by using a network of telescopes around the earth. The more telescopes you use, and the larger they are, the faster this would be accomplished-- identifying and determining the orbits of these asteroids. The other thing that is needed is to develop a space intercept system, to intercept and deflect asteroids or comets headed for the earth, so they cannot impact and explode on earth. Unfortunately, there is no major effort to detect the asteroids, or to develop the interceptor system. However, NASA has developed the Deep Impact spacecraft, which arrived at and hit Comet Tempel 1 on July 4 2005; and when it hit it blasted a crater in it with explosive power equal to 4.5 tons of TNT. Deep Impact is a scientific mission to study comets, but it also developed and demonstrated some of the technology to blast off course a comet or asteroid headed for earth. But what should be done, is to fund NASA to develop a larger spacecraft on a faster schedule, to intercept and deflect a comet or asteroid headed for earth with a nuclear H-bomb blast. A spacecraft that moves really fast is need, to get there as soon as possible, to blast it off course before it gets near earth. The Deep Impact Mission was funded at about $300 million. So it seems that for a few billion $ NASA could develop an asteroid defense spacecraft with a nuclear weapon. You want to have several of the interceptor spacecraft, not just one, since the survival of earth is at stake."""

So stop being babies and get as much money as you can because when you die, you want to die rich, even if you die from old age.

 

Oh and P.S. we are not a target. If anything hits us it will not be a planed assult, just a 1 in a 4.5 Billion shot.

 

That's better odds than Carb getting a...nevermind
And Korr, the cast iron lined with Teflon is for everyone's pants right before it hits.
Mebbe Hans Brix, Big Al Queda, and Dim Dung Ill can declare war on it. Rock on Jihad on Rock?

 

It costs me around $9k to fly round trip to Tokyo on a plane that is older than me. Yet you think that getting everyone off this place (all 5+ billion of us) should be something we work towards?

 

It would be cheaper and more effective just to nuke cities with ultra high populations.

 

kind of sad how many of you dont want to do anything about stuff like this.....And dont think the nasa logo and orbital diagram of 1950DA in my profile make me biased lol....

 

Sir Typestomuch,
Its not about destroying earth, its about destroying Humanity. I my friend would like humanity to survive. But it doesnt matter to me if we survive on earth or mars, all that matters is that humans survive.

 

how can anyone argue against spending a little bit of cash on something that could, or rather, will save humans one day?

 

Im sure they have something, whether its good or not is another question.

 

also, please buy stock in SpaceDev(ticker:SPDV), the price is way to low. If you wanna save humans, youll buy this stock lol...

 

Share the wealth

 

Have fun.

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/

The recent 'near-miss' asteroid was approx half a mile (~800 metres) in diameter.

Some assumptions: Rocky asteroid (2000kg/m^3), nominal speed of 20km/s, impact angle 45 degrees.

The pdf which can you download from the site explaining the calculator has some really interesting stuff.

 

So put your inherited money where your mouth is. Fund a floater and save us all. You got the money, you got the mouth. Do the math.

 

It's about risk management, a project like this is huge money for something that is very unlikely to happen.

As for NASA, I will say that we have a tendency where I work not to hire people that worked there, we've found them not to be results oriented. The culture has changed since Wernher von Braun was asked to go away...