Ah. Okay. In that case, yes. But it only shows that whether breakup or deflection, you want to know and do something as early as possible, when it's as easy as possible...

"Wouldn't blowing up an asteroid just turn it into thousands of meteors which will devastate the planet?"

He's been in the news lately, with his views on space exploration and NASA funding. He's just more of a name than usual, at the moment.

That picture makes sense only if we made Lunar gravity stop working...

Change its orbit in any meaningful way? Not at all likely. But danger from the ejected material ending up here? Possibly, depending on the mass and momentum of the impactor,, and the mechanics of the hit...

And because pulsars do very gradually slow down, assuming any finders understand the binary notation in there, they'll also know just how long it's been in transit...

So, 'My Baby Really Is The Destroyer Of Worlds...'

But please God, don't change until you're done with me...

Nature already does, we're just used to having our water take a few laps out of our sight before it comes back to us...

Nice top image, though it was originally meant to be the star Epsilon Eridani, which appears to have two asteroid belts...

Fast and Fury-ous: Take your pick...

As others have said, it would depend on the mass of the thing. Ignoring the current school of thought that black holes radiate mass-energy away at a rate that has an inverse relationship to the size of their event horizons (low-mass black holes would be radiating strongly, making themselves yet less massive. As Steve…

Actually, the Japanese tried attacking the US during the war with a number of wind-borne balloons (I couldn't say if it was 99, though...) with incendiary devices, in the hope they'd start forest fires.

Yes, actually. You might want to read 'Project Orion' by George Dyson (yes, son of Freeman Dyson of 'dyson Sphere' fame) He covers development yery well, right up to its end.

Assuming that we do ever develop commercial fusion reactors that can use it, it doesn't take a whole lot of the light isotope of helium for nuclear fuel purposes...which is good, as the concentrations are so low that you'd have to process 150 million tons of Lunar regolith (which came from the Sun, via the solar wind)…

This is how it could be done, using solar power and unmanned. Efficient, but neither small nor fast.

Not exactly. Starting from LEO, ion and other low thrust/long duration engines can get you up to escape velocity...eventually. It means gradually spiraling around Earth, getting farther and farther out until escape velocity is reached.

The (nuclear-pulse) Project Orion was mostly killed by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. There are no exceptions in it allowing nuclear detonations for propulsive purposes in space.

Even from a balloon launch, ion engines don't have a thrust greater than the engine's own weight, much less the rest of the ship.

"One of the biggest challenges of space travel is the immense fuel cost of traveling even to our own planet's satellite, let alone one of our neighboring planets."