How to Convert an Asteroid into a Rocket

I love the idea of painting one side white to impart spin! Intergalactic snooker, anyone?

I say you hire a bunch of students for the painting...it'll keep the cost down...

Hi,

With a small nuclear bomb and a little bit of mass as a shield on the side that is away from the asteroid will direct so much ultrafast gas to the surface that it will break up and partially vaporise.

Depositing the bomb on the surface will work even better.

Dig it into the asteroid will do with the biggest ones.

Anything else seems to be fund raising for playing around with good ideas.

RHABE

It would not be of much value, propulsion-wise, to try to impart much force from a near-surface nuclear detonation. The power of a nuclear explosion comes from the heat applied to a large quantity of air. And confined in an air envelope. In space, you would have a small quantity of material scattered in all directions (a reflector shield would do little before it vaporized), with a very small percentage doing anything to help. The greatest effect would be from the vaporiztion of some small amount of surface.

A better bet would be to use a bunker-buster probe to imbed the bomb perhaps 10 m below the surface, pre-crater the site with conventional explosives to create a nozzle, and then detonating your nuke where you would have a substantial mass of vaporized material ejected in a much more directional effect.

The surface explosion would result in some degassing of heated material, but the almost certain pre-existing spin of the object, plus that created by the eccentric effect of the blast, would cause highly unpredictable results. An embedded explosion would have rather instantaneous effect, probably adding a great deal of spin due to the eccentricity from the c.g., and a large portion of lateral, directed force from the nozzle effect on the mass of vaporized material expelled. Also, almost all pieces in the event of fracture would have momentum away from the direction of the crater. Smaller ones would be more easily fractured without the conventional cratering of a nozzle. and helped greatly by the added spin.

Very similar to the propane cannon of a previous blog, confinement and direction increase the effect of an explosion dramatically. Then your ultrafast material all has a direction to go.

RichH