This week we watched Armageddon, which is a fantastic film despite the horribly inaccurate physics portrayed in the movie. NASA’s plan for saving the earth was flawed in several ways. If we ignore the fact that people could actually land a shuttle on the surface of an asteroid and then drill down into it and plant a nuclear weapon, then there is still one huge remaining flaw. Given the size of the asteroid, one nuclear weapon would not even come close to doing what it is shown to do in the movie. Even the largest nuclear weapon ever thought of (not even successfully built) would only split the asteroid and move each piece a few hundred meters in either direction before both smash into the surface of the earth.

My new plan is based off NASA’s plan from the movie, but with a few changes. I would still send astronauts up to the asteroid but instead they would drop 5 Tsar bombs and blow up the asteroid 4 hours after it passed the moon. Then I would send a second and third team, each to land on the surface of the individual pieces of asteroid, and on the surface, detonate more bombs after another 4 hours, causing the pieces to accelerate in the y-axis and allow them to cover enough distance in the y-axis in the remaining 2 hours of time before they smash into the earth.

In doing the calculations to figure out how much explosive power would be needed to propel each half fast enough to clear the earth in the remaining 2 hours, I realized the amount of force needed would be light-years beyond anything mankind is capable of generating with the technology we have today. I determined it would take the equivalent of 5.18x10^11 megatons of TNT, per piece. That would be more than 5.18 Billion Tsar bombs per half of asteroid.