Fallen Earth

The Sotiria Mission

Earth is pretty much fucked. 

It's all our fault. So much for calling us heroes, the people who called us that are going to be ash soon.

And to think it all started with that fucking asteroid.

    The Sotiria Mission was started because of the "Black Asteroid". It came from outside our solar system and instead of being grey like most asteroids it was pitch black, thus the name "Black Asteroid". A bit of info on the identification of asteroids; astronomers find them by looking for the sunlight that reflects off of them. So guess how difficult it is to find one that's pitch black. It was found by some random amateur astronomer after they realize that a cluster of stars had disappeared only eight months before its scheduled collision. 

   The thing was fucking huge too. Remember the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs? That was about 12 kilometers. This one is close to 15. Although the impact itself isn't enough to kill everyone, just like the dinosaurs, the collision will cover the planet in a dust plume and raise temperatures to a vicinity so high it will literally cook any living thing. Fun right? People always said global warming was going to get us eventually.

     I suppose I should probably explain how things failed . . . where do I begin? 

     Since the Asteroid in question was spotted eight months before it's initial impact it left very little wiggle room for planning anything. For reference, preparations for a typical ISS mission takes 6 months. Luckily, space administrations from around the world teamed up to build "The Sotiria" and come up with the mission plan. The plan was to send up the spacecraft so it would get to the asteroid right before it passed the moon. Bonus fact, it would be the furthest humans have ever been from Earth. The ship was called the Sotiria because Sotiria is Greek for salvation and naming shuttles after Greek things is popular apparently. The Sotiria was made of two parts with two separate shuttle crews each containing a pilot, mission specialist, and a payload specialist. 

    The reason for two crews was that when approaching the asteroid, the ship would split in two parts which would both fly close to the asteroid at different locations to cover more ground. Once in position both ships would detonate a bomb consisting of 6 kilograms of plutonium, or about 13 pounds if you use the imperial system. Contrary to the common belief from old sci-fi movies that just nuking an asteroid would solve all our problems, if we were to detonate a nuke in or on the surface of an asteroid it would just break it into a bunch of pieces that would still hit the earth but at different locations. Making it just as deadly. In order for the whole "nuke that sucker" hypothesis to work we would actually need to detonate the bombs close to the asteroid but not on it. The force from the bomb detonation would push the asteroid so it just barely missed Earth.

    Because of the eight month deadline, the mission had to be extremely simplified. Instead of a traditional engine the Sotiria would use nuclear thermal propulsion, or NTP, since nuclear power was something we had a lot of. It was the easiest way to design the spacecraft but it was untested and had never been used before. To add on to that, there wasn't enough time to plan a way to actually get the astronauts home. There also really wasn't much time to come up with a plan to launch the nuclear weapons from the ships so the ships were actually the nukes themselves. 

   So to sum it up, six astronauts were sent into space on a suicide mission, flying on a literal nuclear bomb, with an untested propulsion method.

What could go wrong?