BEWARE! DART asteroid hunting mission can be disastrous for Earth if tech gets into wrong hands
The DART mission to redirect an asteroid is billed as potentially planet-saving. But if the tech gets in the wrong hands, it has seriously destructive potential. In September 2022 an event of planetary importance will take place. With the assistance of a privately funded rocket, NASA's DART mission will test the feasibility of redirecting an asteroid. The mission is, in NASA's words, “to test and validate a method to protect Earth in case of an asteroid impact threat”. NASA's spacecraft will crash head-on into a small asteroid called Dimorphos, with the aim of altering its orbit around a larger asteroid, Didymos.
The excitement about such heroic possibilities is rooted in long-held assumptions about expansion into space. Going higher must mean getting better. However, the consequences of the mission are much less positive than space enthusiasts and many others believe. Given the immense violence potential of fast-moving space objects, the question of whether asteroid redirection is desirable roughly approximates to the question of whether space activities increase or decrease the likelihood of war.
In their 1964 book Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids, astronomers Dandridge Cole and Donald Cox envisioned manoeuvring asteroids to serve as the ultimate deterrent, a “planetoid bomb”. At the time, these plans were advanced as solutions to the threat of nuclear war, specifically to the vulnerabilities of nuclear weapons based on Earth. Never attempted, these schemes were shockingly extreme, even among the apocalyptic military speculations of the 1950s and 1960s.
Cole and Cox wrote that a “captured planetoid” of between 2 kilometres and 8 kilometres in diameter would have the “impact energy equivalent to several
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