But the problem is that this is all on paper. The spacecraft hasn't been built yet. So you'd need a minimum of 2 years (and that's rushing it).
Other plans not involving a spacecraft include using a laser to push against it to slow it down enough, but that's decades away.
As for sending up a nuke to blow it up into little pieces, that's not going to happen. First off what would happen if the rocket loaded with a nuke had an accident at liftoff and blew up in our atmosphere? That's something that NASA isn't willing to chance. Second of all the nuke would have to be more powerful than any nuke currently in existence. A better plan would be to set a nuke off near it and let the blast wave push it away from us. But even that would invalidate several nuclear non-proliferation treaties that keep nuclear weapons out of space. So once again you'd have to go to the drawing board and try to design a rocket capable of carrying a nuke to the asteroid, which is something that doesn't currently exist, while politicians bicker about allowing it (and paying for it).
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spot a say: A half mile wide asteroid is 0.8km wide. Assuming it is spherical, it has a volume of 268,082,573 cubic metres. ssuming 1.5 tons per cubic metre 402,123,859 tons. A 50 megaton nuke on hte surface would do next to nothing. A hole wide enough for the nuke and 250 metres deep could destroy the asteroid. What is the energy in an asteroid half a mile wide, weighing 400 million tons, and travelling at 80,000 kph?
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ArmonuS say: no
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Hindusufi say: Yes if we could hit it 20 years before its orbital path crosses earths. A change in the path of one millionth of an arcsecond would cause it to miss the earth. The trick is knowing that far ahead of time.
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Ricki say: Not with our current technology.
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Satan Claws say: No.
Remember the 20-yard-wide meteor that fell without warning in Russia four years ago?
One month after that happened, the US congress convened a public hearing to listen the administrator of NASA, the President's Science Advisor and the Commander of the US Space Command. You'll be interested in listening what the administrator of NASA had to say at the time, at the 1h11m mark (it only takes 1 minute, go ahead and listen):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwHeU8dF...
(The "that side and that side" comment points to the two major political parties involved in the US congress.)
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sam say: Yes, Bruce Willis, I've seen him do it in a film
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