Rileymanrr

Pretty much. The mission would be almost identical to the Deep Impact mission except with a nuke instead of a kinetic energy payload. That is why it is an attractive option, because we are already most of the way there technologically.

You forgot the rest of that requirement: "any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner." It is literally everything but you read is why you can't do that. You are stationing an atomic device in outer space. The part that the treaty has a problem with is in direct conflict with the "...in any other manner..." Article IV if you were wondering.

That isn't really how it works. At some point you would be in an orbit around the sun. That is why they used such broad terminology. The second you break the sphere of influence of earth you enter the orbital domain of the sun. Unless you achieve solar escape (42.1 km/s) within the sphere of influence of the earth you are not going to skirt the limits of the treaty. You want to develop a launch vehicle with (11 (earth)+ 42.1(sun)=53.1 kilometers of delta V? Ok, I think it would be easier to just get the OST signing nations to agree on something. Or just run the thing into the asteroid. With a mass of 1500 kilograms it is going to land like a half kiloton nuclear weapon. Without the nuke. Edit: you can't use a gravity turn during launch either. You would have to launch straight up and just go straight for the asteroid.

So the problem with your theory is that all of the nations that could develop this technology already have atomic weapons. The number of nukes that currently exist is well above the number needed to seriously disrupt the environment and societies on earth. The UN has had next to nothing to do with the stabilization of the world with atomic weapons, the individual states that have them have done a perfect job. Personally I would rather leave the UN out of it because most of the member nation's opinions don't have the ability to actually do anything on either the space development or atomic weapons deployment. Using asteroids as weapons by using *nukes* to move them around is extremely dicey, you can only get rough directional adjustments with atomic weapons, but to miss earth rough is perfect. To hit a point on earth you would much rather use something like a gravity tractor or solar reflector or a laser, something with fine control. If a nuke changes an asteroid's velocity by 10 m/s it doesn't matter what direction you do it in, it is going to miss earth. If you park a gravity tug and slowly coerce the asteroid's impact point around the surface of the earth, that is a problem. Let's just say that the communications goes out just as the aimpoint passes over Beijing. Opps. With a nuke there is little doubt because of the yield of the warhead. As long as you don't use a dial-a-yield warhead there is no chance of 'accidentally-ing' a giant crater in the earth.

You are if it is a gravel asteroid. That is actually exactly what you want to happen. If you don't have enough warning to divert it with a series of near-bursts, you actually decrease the predicted damage by shattering the asteroid so that when it hits earth it is at it's largest diameter, before gravity pulls it back together: Here is some actual science as opposed to baseless speculation: That is a computer simulation done by Los Alamos national labs with a one megaton 'energy source' on the short side of a long asteroid. Park that 'source' in the middle of a long face as opposed to a short edge and you can get a much different effect. They said that they needed 'a few months' to properly intercept, with a prepared launch vehicle.

If you know anything about shotguns a very useful analogy exists. Having earth get hit by a single chunk of asteroid is going to be like shooting something with a shotgun slug. Breaking it up into a few large chunks is like using buckshot, and turning it into hundreds of little pieces is like using birdshot. If you don't get the reference Youtube those three things and you will understand. It is actually almost always better to have the birdshot scenario than the slug scenario.

That's why it should be dealt with *before* that time. Fast tracking needs to be avoided because let's be serious, the UN is worthless when they are needed to actually do something. This is not a UN resolution, however, the security council has no say in this matter. What needs to happen is half of the signers need to agree to an amendment, the UN is just the stage. That is actually a good thing because this means vetoes are not a problem, but you have to get more than fifty countries to look at this properly and be like "OK" or a few countries need to drop out of it. There is no governing body of the OST.

No, ICBMs are not covered by this treaty because all of their flight profiles are *sub*orbital, otherwise they would never impact.

No, for most cases it doesn't matter how many parts you blow it into the atmospheric drag is going to be greater on multiple chunks (lower impact velocity) than one large chunk (higher impact velocity). What you want to do is get it as slow as possible before it hits the ground, breaking it up increases effective drag.

I am in college and for my Technical Communications class I had to pick a topic to do a research proposal on. The project I chose was designing an asteroid intercept mission profile, with launch vehicle, launch windows, payload and technical aspects taken care of. This was fine, but I realized there were a couple of really good scientific papers out on it already, so I broadened my horizons. I figured I would instead tackle the problem of actually deploying aforementioned good plan. So I figured that there would be something that would stand in my way (some loophole or complication) and the result was not too surprising. The Outer Space Treaty. This bans the use or travel of atomic devices (nuclear explosives, atomic bombs, thermonuclear warheads, whatever name you want to call them) from earth orbit and beyond. They may not be stationed on the moon, an orbital platform or any other orbital body in space, at all. So this is where we stand... Myself and two other people (my partners on this project) have been trying to find if anyone has tried to address the concerns that signers of the Outer Space Treaty will have with the actual development and deployment of a proper planetary defense strategy. For this to be cost and time effective we need to be able to implement atomic explosives in the design, but currently this discussion does not seem to exist. Everyone seems to be very interested in either end of the spectrum. One end being the detection of the NEOs and the other being different strategies to deflect them (Explosives, kinetics, lasers, gravity tractors, landed rockets etc.) But I cannot find a single instance where anyone has addressed the legal problem of developing an orbital vehicle for planetary defense. This seems ridiculous, for I am but one in seven billion, someone must have discussed this problem before today. The only tiny mention that exists anywhere seems to be another (and I had predicted this to be true) KSP forum post, but that discussion diverted from the actual problem in about three replies and stopped. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/33208-How-long-will-the-Outer-Space-Treaty-last/page3 I have been a long time player of this game, but only just now joined the forums. I know my little brother is here all the time so I will just say hi to him. If anyone has any ideas as to how to proceed with this discussion, please share them. I also have to find an "expert" on this problem, and my school is actually chocked full of those (if I were just talking about intercepting an asteroid), but nobody for international law, which is the real problem. I frankly find this to be insane, I will leave with the most insane quote I could find on the topic this is during a US Congressional inquiry: "REP. STEWART: ... are we technologically capable of launching something that could intercept [an asteroid]? ... DR. A'HEARN: No. If we had spacecraft plans on the books already, that would take a year ... I mean a typical small mission ... takes four years from approval to start to launch ..." So any commentary that you may have is better than what exists now. I will except "Rileymanrr, you stupid." because it is more than what we have right now. Edit: Hey guys, stay focused. There have been simulations showing an intercept of a kilometer sized asteroid with atomic explosives we have right now with a lead time of only 30 days *from detection*. The amount of material that entered earth's atmosphere was only .1% of the total mass of the asteroid. The technicalities of intercepts isn't the problem here, we have that down and the strategies should work. We have enough control to keep an object from fragmenting (which is almost always preferable to solid impacts) by detonating the device above the surface. It is less efficient, but completely doable. I would post the papers, but I am running off of my campus's internet, which allows me access to the papers for free.