HOW

TO KILL

AN ASTEROID

THE ABSURD TRUE STORY

OF THE SCIENTISTS

DEFENDING THE PLANET

☄️ 💥 ☠️

october 2024

It’s 7pm on September 26th, 2022. Across the campus of a university in Maryland, hundreds of people are glued to their screens—windows into the cold depths of space—counting down to the moment that everything changes. And all over the world, astronomers are standing by their telescopes, all pointed at one tiny speck of light in the night sky. Seven million miles from home, an uncrewed spaceship is heading toward an asteroid at breakneck speeds. Its mission: to crash straight into it, losing its robotic life in the process and change the journey of that asteroid around the sun. 

This is it. This single space mission could alter the course of human history. 

Forget the planet killers; astronomers have found pretty much all the heftiest asteroids. But tens of thousands of so-called city killers – asteroids the size of football stadiums – lurk out there in the darkness, as yet undiscovered. They are far more likely to impact Earth than those rarer, larger rocky beasts. They have struck Earth plenty of times in the past. More impacts are a certainty. And if we get unlucky, one could careen into a random country with little warning, killing millions of people in an instant. 

For most of our species’ existence, we were helpless to stop such a catastrophe. But perhaps no longer: If all goes according to plan, in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to prevent any of those elusive city killer asteroids from ever reaching our planet, making this the only natural disaster we can completely prevent. And it all starts with something as brilliant as it is absurd: build a spacecraft like none other, find an asteroid, slam into it as fast as possible, and deflect it—a trial run for saving a city, a country, or even the world. 

Voyaging across the world, from America to Japan, from Botswana to Russia, before journeying millions of miles through space, HOW TO KILL AN ASTEROID tells the propulsive true story of how a maverick team of madcap scientists and eccentric engineers plan to prevent an inevitable future asteroid impact by creating Earth’s planetary defense system—one that ultimately hinges on whether humanity’s very first attempt to dramatically deflect an asteroid succeeds or fails. And it only took a prison break, Oppenheimer, a small city in North Carolina volunteering to be hit by an asteroid, two robots stealing cosmic matter from the dawn of time, blowing up cotton candy with a very big gun, several exploding alien intruders exploding, a planet killer comet striking Jupiter, priceless extraterrestrial material being hidden in a British shopping bag, a spy inside the sun’s vast shadow, a giant hole in the middle of Arizona, a small Italian box in deep space, Star Wars, Star Trek, a wild idea by someone in the U.S. Air Force, and a heck of a lot of people looking up, to get there.