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from the fully-armed-and-operation-battle-station dept.
NASA's Brian Muirhead has speculated about the best way to construct a "Death Star" or other weaponized space station:
The best way to build a Death Star is to construct one out of an already-existing asteroid, says Brian Muirhead, chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It could provide the metals," he says. "You have organic compounds, you have water—all the building blocks you would need to build your family Death Star."
And Muirhead knows a thing or two about asteroids. He's actually working on NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission, which will land on an asteroid, collect a piece, and then place it in orbit around the moon. A crewed mission will then go collect samples from that chunk while it's in orbit. (OK, so it's not quite building a Death Star, but it's still pretty cool.)
The Wired article includes a video.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DECbot on Monday December 14 2015, @07:01PM
As one evil mastermind to another, I really appreciate the elegance of your doomsday device. It is really quite simple once you solve the energy requirements of changing the orbit of an asteroid of sufficient mass to cause an earth shattering kaboom. If I wasn't so vested in my greenhouse gas doomsday strategy, I would assist with yours as its simplicity and effective impact is most apparent. Yet it is not to be as I'm quite engaged maintaining the world's dependence on carbon emitting energy. You see, as a fringe benefit of destroying the earth with green house gases, I become filthy rich investing in oil and natural gas!
If you could please excuse me, these climate denial blogs don't write themselves...
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base