Over on X, Stephen Fleming was talking about the need to get on serious asteroid defense. Quick Aside: if you are serious about space and space exploration/exploitation, you should know and follow Stephen. In response to his post and a number of comments, I made a simple suggestion: X-Prize the mission as NASA is not up to it in my opinion.
In the long run, it will be a lot less expensive and likely to drive development of some key industries — not to mention creating new and innovative technologies and applications — than trying to run it as yet another government program. Make it open ended in all the key details: launch systems undefined, method undefined, tech undefined: the only thing that should be defined is success (asteroid does not hit Earth) and if there are any secondary objectives that need to take place (exploration, detection, etc) at the same time.
Make sure that teams can win rather than an individual company. I can think of some interesting and potentially effective partnerships right off the top of my head. It also has the chance to push the launch industry along and get some real competition to Space-X underway, which would be a good thing.
Also, though it would require some long-overdue revisions to space law/treaties, give the successful company twenty-year (pick a period) rights to that asteroid or to any asteroid that poses a threat and is neutralized. Depending on the type of asteroid, there could be some nice materials to be extracted/exploited. If nothing else, novelty sales could be quite the thing. Think about it, what would you pay to own a knife or other object made from the asteroid that threatened Earth? Again, this is an opportunity to start bootstrapping orbital industry and making needed changes to space treaties/law.
Minimize the regulatory process as much as possible. Under the previous administration this was weaponized and that’s the last thing we need right now. Use this as a means to identify problems while impact odds are low, so that we have an effective and robust system/options in place for real need.
Since there is already some huffing and puffing over my contention that NASA is not up to this, let me lay out the basics. First, I have done work for NASA as a contractor on both Spacelab and later SPD/Commercial. I grew up in the 60s on NASA and can-do. Heck, Von Braun himself recruited my cousin Jimmy to join his team and was involved in those heady days. Those days, however, are gone.
Yes, NASA has demonstrated that asteroid deflection can be done. Exercise for the student: look up the full timeline on that, from when it was first proposed to actual implementation. Then look up the budget for that over those years. NASA can still do some amazing things if given enough time and massive budgets.
As part of that, consider also that NASA has not successfully designed and implemented a new man-rated launch system since the mid-70s (STS). The current Constellation/Orion/WhateverElseTheyCallIt literally costs more than a billion dollars per launch, they have launched how many (?) and I could go on but there is no way to consider it a viable and successful system. Keep in mind that most (cough) NASA programs began decades ago.
Then, as I’ve mentioned before, there is the institutional culture of no failure. Not that failure is not an option, but that if there is even a chance something won’t work perfectly in view of the public, it tends to get canned. That also ties into the perfect safety issue, which tends to stifle innovation and more. There is more, but those are going to be two huge hurdles for getting anything done through NASA.
Put anything and everything on the table as an option, from nukes (the government has a small and obscure agency that actually owns all our nukes, DoD merely “leases” them so to speak) to a space broom. Nothing off the table, nothing can’t be tried as keep in mind that the prize only pays out for success.
For planetary defense of this nature, we need fast, we need nimble, we need innovation. Government is going to be the obstacle, not the facilitator. Doing this as an X-prize makes economic sense and opens the doors of economic and scientific advancement in space exploration/exploitation.
Just my two cents…
Oh, and if you missed this wonderful bit at Instapundit a while back:
O it’s Elon this, an’ Elon that, an’ “Chuck ‘im out, the cad!”;
But it’s “Elon, please, a rocket!” when the rocks are lookin’ bad.
When the rocks are lookin’ bad, my boys, the rocks are lookin’ bad,
O it’s “Save us, Mr. Elon!” when the rocks are lookin’ bad.
I would say as of now any effort to modify it’s course is at best questionable for a variety of reasons
1) 2024YR4’s path is only weakly understood. data is still being discovered it may be that collision goes away as better orbital data is gathered.
2) It will make another pass in December of 2028. That in itself may change the path (remember 1). Modifying the path before that pass may make things worse.
3) we have VERY limited data on the make up of 2024YR4. How to affect its orbit will depend greatly on its composition. Is it a loose pile of rocks, a single rocky object, a single metal based object, or a carbonaceous chondrite? These also affect it’s potential damage.
4) at present its best guess value power equivalent is about 8 Megatons equivalent. Right now the possible track runs from the Pacific just south of Central America across a bit of northern South America, across the Atlantic crossing into Northern sub Saharan Africa over the entrance to the Red Sea across the Arabian Sea and then crossing India about halway down finally ending in Bangledesh/ Myanmar. The real ugly spot is India. The track looks to go over Mumbai (Bombay) and Kolkata (Calcutta).
Although there are several potentially really horrible results from this (estimated) set of paths playing with the orbit could make things far worse. if you delay it it crosses up across China and perhaps Japan. Change it radically and you may find it crossing the Northern Hemisphere in some later orbit.
Definitely something needs to be flown to it (perhaps as it returns in 2028?) to gather data. As we have to likely do gravity assists to get speed you have maybe 12 months to get this thing moving. That suggests an off the shelf launcher (likely Falcon Heavy expending all boosters that provides max Delta V). We need to have 3-4 teams building solutions with strict schedule requirements and description of data needed. The DART mission might be a good starting place as the hardware designs are known. There can also be efforts to design deflectors but likely you need to scattershot this based on composition assumptions and know some of your efforts will be wasted.
Might be nice to think about evacuation strategies for potential landing zones. I can’t imagine what a Charlie Foxtrot trying to evacuate Mumbai (21 M rersidents) or Kolkata (~16 M residents) would be even with 3-6 month lead and knowing you have to relocate 10-20 Mi +- outside the potential strike zone.
The success condition is likely to occur anyway, how can you award a prize?
Not sure how you are defining things, or if you are serious, but consider this: if it’s going to miss anyway, use it for target practice. That is to say, modify the prize to go to the group that demonstrates the best new system/tech/etc. for deflection or control. Again, it would not hurt to be able to put even large asteroids into harmless orbits which may also allow for extraction and/or exploration/exploitation. The Earth is safe and we get multiple means of protecting Earth without pouring money into a bureaucracy.
Seems like this is a basic business proposal issue.
1) What’s required to achieve contact with objects moving through space in our solar system?
1b) What’s required to achieve contact with this object moving through space in our solar system?
2) What’s required to change that object’s path?
2b) To what path should it be changed?
1) is the necessary prerequisite to all follow-on steps and . This is something that Tiger Teams do every day, at least in my former biz they did. Merge several Tiger Teams from different areas – proprietary info needs some degree of protection to accomplish this – because “propulsion” is different from “navigation” which is different from “redirect” which is different from “destroy” which is different from “harvesting” which is different from…..
And the drill-down into the minutia that’s necessary will undoubtedly cross a number of proprietary boundaries because Company A has this neat gizmo that does X, but is in competition with Company D which is trying to market a similar gizmo, etc. Which points out that “limited sharing between companies” – which gummint always looks at as anti-trust violations and sends in the prosecutors – could produce a combined market effort that on its face looks monopolistic but what’s actually wrong with American companies monopolizing the world market by working together in a limited partnership? What if some wiz kids figure a way to put the thing in far earth orbit for a couple years while they mine it for value, then send what’s left into the sun?
Ah, screw it, let’s order pizza and watch American Idol, the asteroid will land where it lands, earth is a big planet and 8 megatons ain’t all that much anyway. Who knows, we might get lucky and the asteroid saves us the trouble of having to rebuild Los Angeles.
As a first order approximation, 2024 YR4 would need less than 8 cm/s delta-v in 2028 to completely miss Earth in 2032.
Dimorphos is at least 10x the size of 2024 YR4. The DART mission changed the velocity of Dimorphos by ~2.7 mm/s. Also, a new DART would hit 2024 YR4 at almost double the velocity.
This all seems pretty manageable.