Re: Earth-grazing asteroids as a military resource

On 6/03/2025 8:28 am, Dave Platt wrote:

In article <vq8jtq$299g5$1@dont-email.me>,
Bill Sloman  <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

In addition to that... if you really want a bunch of them moved into
Earth-grazing orbits, it'll require a truly huge industrial effort to
loft the necessary number of "engines" to divert them into those
orbits (e.g. by gravity-tug effect, ablative lasers, etc.).

 I haven't done the calculations - but then again neither have you.
 My guess is that sort of ion drives that you'd use wouldn't be all that big, and you'd power them with solar cells. They'd need to keep pushing for quite a while. The first stage would be to stop the asteroid tumbling and get it spinning on an axis that more or less pointed at the sun so that the solar cells could stay illuminated for most of the time.
 You might have ship up more reaction mass from time to time. Using theasteroid mass as your reaction mass might be practicable, but it would be an additional complication.
 

Do you really expect that any nation can do such a thing, and not have it
detected and traced back to the nation in question?  Outer space is
a lot more "visible" than something like the Manhattan Project was.

 But there is a lot of it, and most of the action would be happening a long way away from the earth - more than 93 million miles, on average.