An asteroid already on a collision course with Earth only needs a tiny push to miss if we hit it early enough -- think about slightly bumping a sniper before he

An asteroid already on a collision course with Earth only needs a tiny push to miss if we hit it early enough -- think about slightly bumping a sniper before he takes the shot. An asteroid a month out, heading straight for Earth's center, could be redirected to just skim the outer atmosphere with only about 4 m/s of delta-V. On the other hand, getting a near-miss asteroid to orbit Earth instead means taking it from above escape velocity (11.2 km/s) to an orbital velocity, which means at least a thousand times more delta-V (more like 4 km/s). And that's the easy case -- getting an asteroid from the belt to fall toward Earth is another several km/s on top of that. Besides, ejecting 1M kilograms into a busy Earth orbit in order to slow the asteroid down sounds like a pretty scary idea. Especially since we'd have to do it hundreds of times for one asteroid. So no, it wouldn't be the same technology at all.