Quoting Michael Carnes <MichaelCarnes@earthlink.net>:
I have absolutely zero faith in the ability of defense contractors to make a working missile defense and equally little faith in their ability to control the path of any large body in space by means of explosions.
You will never know what you are capable of unless you try. If you fail on the first attempt, or, several first attempts and then throw your hands in the air and quit, then you can never expect to succeed in anything. When developing any type of weapons system you never hit a home run the first time up to bat. Whether it's the delivery system (weapon) or the software (ballistics engineer), it takes a skilled team and continuous practice to work out the kinks and make the required corrections to hit the target. Even the worlds most dangerous weapon, a Marine sniper, rarely works alone. He has a spotter who continually feeds him environmental data that will throw the round off target. The sniper then takes this information and makes the necessary adjustments to the weapon.
The complexity of the required software is orders of magnitude greater than the couple of cooked demos that sort of, kind of, worked.
Didn't we just hit a comet with something on July 4th? And didn't someone land a probe on an asteroid recently? I'm pretty sure that the software exists. It might need a little tweaking here and there, but Im not ready to throw in the towel just yet on these projects yet. We've been hitting targets in space with various probes for years. Some have not been so successful in landing correctly, but who cares when the object is to destroy something. Secondly, we don't really know what will happen if we were to hit an asteroid or comet with a warhead. We have a lot of nuclear wepons on this planet that we probably ought to be thinking about getting rid of before they all fall in the wrong hands. Why not pick some targets outside our atmosphere, and do a little target practice? Nothing ventured nothing gained.
Perhaps with a few years of sustained testing (another term for all-out war), a few of the kinks could get worked out. But systems that complex never, ever, ever work the first time in the real world. Never. Simulations help, as do war-gaming and unit tests. But the real world always throws surprises at you.
Bingo! We agree... BTW, I have 2 kids in Iraq who are hoping our defense contractors continue to get things right.