Drill deep, detonate: China's nuclear asteroid plan beats NASA DART by 110x

Researchers at China's Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology have published a study arguing that the best way to stop a civilization-threatening asteroid is to drill into it first, then detonate a nuclear charge underground. The peer-reviewed paper, published in Space: Science & Technology journal, claims this approach is up to 110 times more effective than NASA's DART mission — the current gold standard for planetary defense.

The physics of the problem

A nuclear blast on the surface of an asteroid wastes most of its energy into open space. The Chinese study uses computer modeling to show that placing a charge at roughly 30 meters depth transfers far more energy directly into the rock. At that depth, the efficiency is three times greater than a 10-meter detonation, and dozens of times better than a surface explosion. The idea is essentially the same logic as shaped charges used in mining and demolition: containment multiplies force.

The numbers

The scale of what's possible is striking. According to the study, a 3-megaton detonation — roughly 200 times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb — could completely destroy a 100-meter asteroid. A smaller 300-kiloton charge would suffice for a 50-meter object. For a 1-kilometer asteroid, the kind capable of ending modern civilization, a deep-buried charge could shift its velocity by around 30 cm/s.

That last figure matters for context. NASA's DART spacecraft, which successfully impacted the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, achieved a velocity change of just 2.7 mm/s — a real-world demonstration of kinetic deflection. The Chinese model's claimed 30 cm/s is about 111 times larger, for a far bigger target.

Two spacecraft, one mission

The proposed architecture sends two vehicles in sequence. The first creates the borehole on impact; the second delivers the nuclear payload into the cavity. This removes the near-impossible challenge of threading a warhead into a moving rock traveling at up to 72,000 km/h.

There is a hard constraint, though: the whole system only works with years of advance warning. Detection infrastructure — tracking every "city-killer" asteroid before it becomes an emergency — remains the bottleneck. Without that lead time, even the most efficient deflection method arrives too late. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 also has no clear framework for nuclear operations in deep space, and no binding international protocol currently governs who gets to deploy such a mission and when. The science is advancing faster than the policy.