... and? I mean, this idea has been around for a long time. It took a bit of hunting, but I think I found the source paper. At the very least, here's an arxiv.

... and? I mean, this idea has been around for a long time. It took a bit of hunting, but I think I found the source paper. At the very least, here's an arxiv.org preprint submitted 14 Sep 2020 titled "Assembled Kinetic Impactor for Deflecting Asteroids via Combining the Spacecraft with the Launch Vehicle Final Stage" by Wang et al. and with three of the authors affiliated with China's National Space Science Center. What's new is: "In order to improve the deflection efficiency of the kinetic impactor strategy, this paper proposed a new concept called the Assembled Kinetic Impactor (AKI), which is combining the spacecraft with the launch vehicle final stage."