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Does it have to be hurtling toward Earth? How about first parking it at the L4 or L5 Earth-Sun Lagrange point, and then nudging it so it leisurely meanders towa
by tzs 2y ago
Does it have to be hurtling toward Earth? How about first parking it at the L4 or L5 Earth-Sun Lagrange point, and then nudging it so it leisurely meanders toward Earth instead of hurtles toward Earth?
That would enter the atmosphere orders of magnitude slower than meteors do. Would that be enough for it to largely survive the fall to the surface either stay largely intact on impact or break up but the pieces would all be in the same general area?
- DennisP 2y agoHeh that's an interesting point. It doesn't have to orbit the Earth, so it doesn't necessarily have lots of lateral velocity to burn off. It'd be interesting to work the numbers for just matching the Earth's velocity around the sun, at a distance of a few hundred kilometers. Edit: based on a quick chat with Claude Sonnet, reentry velocity would be about a fourth as high, but getting to that initial orbit in the first place makes the whole project significantly harder. But maybe if ablation from reentries became an environmental problem, and deep-space propulsion got really good, it'd be worthwhile.
- kibwen 2y agoWhile the interplanetary transfer network is real (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo...), getting a payload onto the network itself requires a large and varying amount of energy based on where your asteroid is located. And then once you've successfully gotten your giant rock of solid platinum to some Earth-Sun Lagrange point, you still need to manage its descent to Earth, and beyond the technical difficulties of trying to steer it precisely, the superpowers of the world are unlikely to be peachy keen on the idea of a private company having global orbital bombardment capabilities, which is going to be a political headache of its own.