I am not super comfortable with a company whose purpose is figuring out pinpoint meteor strikes.
That seems like a recipe for acquisition by the military? Who needs nukes when you can lob a hunk of iron at a city?
That seems like a recipe for acquisition by the military? Who needs nukes when you can lob a hunk of iron at a city?
The reason we have ICBMs is that we can store them safely on the ground, and launch them on an unpredictable trajectory, with minutes of travel time to their destination, preferably launched in a swarm that makes them even harder to track and individually stop.
If you have the energy to mine in space, you have a massive kinetic energy well to “throw rocks” into.
So if anyone tried to send rockets to fling back pieces of asteroid or of the Moon as weapons to Earth will be easily observed, tracked, and countered. And anyway, we're very far off being able to send a chunk of rock towards Earth that wouldnt entirely burn up in the atmosphere, nevermind one that could level a city.
There's a lot of complexity here you're ignoring. You can nudge a rock into a collision course with Earth using a slow ion thruster, but you're not going to stop it with one. Time is not on your side, you need to get your affecter to the rock, during which the rock will be getting closer and (assuming it came from the asteroid belt) faster, both of which make the required impulse higher. Higher impulse means more mass and/or propellant, which means even more time and cost!
This is not a symmetrical problem, but defense rarely is. The fact we can shoot bullets at supersonic speeds doesn't make it any easier to stop them.
And many years of the engine running would still be easily reverted by one or two high energy impacts, like a fusion bomb hitting the asteroid just right.
Consider this as well from an energy diff perspective - to hit a city with the same energy as a nuclear bomb, you have to have the final mass times the final speed squared about equal to the energy of the fusion bomb. And to get that, you have to put in energy that's proportional to the mass before burning up in the atmosphere times the square of the delta of the speed difference between its original speed and its speed on a collision course with the Earth. So you need to find an asteroid that's pretty close to hitting the Earth, and still put in the energy to move its full mass the extra distance.
You're right this is not fully a symmetrical problem, but it's asymmetrical in the opposite direction: defense is a lot easier than offense in this case, simply because of the massive inertia of the weapon. To alter your metaphor of the bullets, there's a reason why we shoot explosive rockets instead of just hurling huge rocks at our enemies. And it's precisely the same reason why a nuclear weapon is much better than an asteroid.
The nuke poisons the land, a metallic asteroid just makes a conventional mess you cleanup and rebuild under your own flag...
Clearly they would need permission as for any landing.
Capsules land with shaped ablative heat shields all the time so it seems proven but the hard part would be making one off earth.
Maybe they’ll just send a small capsule up though and return the metals with that.
Existing system https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pYKDNSYw1NQ