Everyone was ready: NASA, nuclear weapons scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, astronomers, US Space Command, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, even the White House.

A killer asteroid was barreling toward North Carolina and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Impact was imminent. In just a matter of hours, America, and the world, would be transformed through an act of cosmic violence. Everyone hoped for the best but braced for the worst.

And that’s when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Few people knew how to react. But Leviticus “L.A.” Lewis did. “Guess what? The asteroid won’t care that humans are trying to kill each other. It’s still going to keep coming, and we’re going to have to respond.” Nobody could disagree. Lewis, who is the representative for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, at NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, turned to the hundreds of assembled federal, state, and local officials, scientists, engineers, and emergency managers. The show must go on, he declared. And so, it did: on February 24, 2022, as the Russian military launched their assault on their democratic neighbor, North Carolina was hit by an asteroid.

Between February 23 and 24, while DART was on its way to Dimorphos, experts had gathered at its birthplace, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, for a role-­playing game. Everyone assumed the same character roles they had in real life. Their realm was not mythical, but terrestrial; their nemesis was not a dragon, but an Earthbound asteroid.

This game had been played several times before—­sometimes more casually, sometimes in the United States, other times abroad, each with a varying number of participants. But this iteration of the war game was the most detailed, the most populated, the least imperfect simulacrum of the worst disaster yet to transpire[1]. And Lewis was one of several dungeon masters, watching the players respond to a preplanned but malleable story. The goal: to see how people handle the unthinkable, and to hear how they may ward off the direst outcomes—­all to prepare them for the day that this grim fantasy becomes a reality.

The scripts always change with each game. Sometimes, the detection-­to-­impact timeline is years; other times, it’s just a few months. The asteroids can be enormous, or Tunguska-­size threats. They can impact land, or bodies of water, anywhere on the planet. Whatever the situation, the timeline is compressed and squeezed into a few days, in which players try to handle the many surprises the dungeon masters periodically lob into their gameplay.

CNEOS director Paul Chodas (along with his team) was chiefly responsible for coming up with the rocky dragon’s stats and its Earthbound trajectory. When I spoke with him, he quickly dismissed the dungeon master moniker. “For me, it’s a mathematical problem,” he said. Indeed so. Then again, to be fair, like a dungeon master, his task is to work out how much damage a Demogorgon (an asteroid) can inflict on a mage (us). “Originally, it was an instructive exercise to inform the community, and decision-­makers especially, of what we would know if there was an impact scenario—­what the uncertainties would be and how our knowledge would evolve over time and the limitations of our knowledge, frankly.”

That aim had not changed over the past few years. But the intensity of the exercises, and the number of people playing, had risen considerably. In February 2022, the games had reached their pedagogic zenith—­and much of that was down to the leadership of Lewis, the FEMA representative, someone who never quite believed he was handpicked to do battle with otherworldly forces.

He was a kid when President Kennedy gave his famous 1961 speech[2]—­“ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”—­and it resonated with young Lewis. Public service seemed appealing. But he also loved things that went really damn fast. “You know, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, all of that crap, that was me, I was all over it,” he told me, every word animated, emphasized, bursting with zeal. And as he emerged into adolescence, his passion was kept alight, aided by the Apollo space program.

“The most powerful weapon my mom got for me was a library card. It was all over after that,” he said. “I was always nerdy, always liked that stuff. Everybody else in my neighborhood went to the basketball court. I got my dad to get me a telescope.” He attended science fairs and launched model rockets. He was teased—­but his smarts eventually won him the respect of others.

Being an astronaut, or building rockets for spacers, was his goal. Instead, his career became something more kaleidoscopic. He served twenty years in the US Navy, studying the ways of ship-­based surface warfare and ultimately reaching the rank of commander[3]. He retired his commission and was working at the Pentagon in 2001 when the September 11 attacks took place. In 2007, he joined FEMA, taking on multiple high-­profile roles at the nation’s disaster coordination agency while working closely with the FBI. He got married, had kids, and after forty-­four years of service, he felt he was approaching retirement. Hanging up his cap on Christmas Day, 2023, felt right.

But a few years before his planned retirement, NASA gave Lewis a call and told him he was needed for one last mission: dealing with asteroid impacts. “I was ecstatic!” he told me, laughing. What better contribution to the world, he thought, than helping to protect everyone on it. “It’d be nice to know I contributed something to this place before I check out.”

FEMA normally deals with terrestrial natural disasters—­hurricanes, floods, and so forth. Asteroids may be out there in more ways than one, but they are still a type of natural disaster. “It’s another low-­probability but extremely high-­consequence event. It’s responsible for us to be prepared for it,” said Lewis. And he and his fellow dungeon masters pulled no punches with the 2022 war game: the discovery-­to-­impact timeline was only six months. It was going to hit America this time, though initially, they weren’t quite sure where the strike would occur.

“In this case, a municipality in the United States actually volunteered to be the impact victim,” he told me: the North Carolinian city of Winston-­Salem[4], population 250,000. And for the first time, hundreds of state and local officials—­not just mostly federal officials—­were involved, dialing in to the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, from their home state. Isn’t it sort of funny that a city offered to be the victim of a simulated catastrophe? “I’m not sure some of their fellow officials thought it was funny,” Lewis said.

Plenty of the participating local officials and first responders didn’t know what to make of all this. Why would anyone offer up their metropolis as a sacrifice to the astral gods? You would have to ask the guy responsible: August Vernon, the city’s director of emergency management. “I’m not a scientist,” he told me. “I’m a closeted sci-­fi geek.” And he was euphoric from the word go. In a manner of speaking, he couldn’t wait for Winston-­Salem to be pulverized. It’s true that, early on, his colleagues were either skeptical or outright hostile toward the war game. “Is this a joke? What are we doing this for? What’s next, aliens?” he recalled them asking. It wasn’t a totally unreasonable reaction, considering how many other problems—­including the coronavirus pandemic—­they were actively addressing. But like Lewis, Vernon considered an impact to be like any other tragedy: everyone thinks the government is overreacting until something awful happens, and then they ask why the government didn’t do more to prevent it.

Every year in Winston-­Salem, city and county emergency management officials get together and run various drills. “From school shootings, to cyberattacks, to plane crashes . . . we had done pandemic exercises before COVID,” Vernon said. “We have what’s called an all-­hazard approach. The federal government does the same thing.” Big eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, chemical plants blowing up—­you name it, they’ve rehearsed it. An asteroid impact was the logical next step. And why should they take the Hollywood route? “Whether it’s an asteroid or a Godzilla attack, it doesn’t matter,” he said: it’s always the same major cities getting destroyed. Why should Los Angeles get all the apocalyptic attention? Vernon reached out to Lewis, and the simulated asteroid had its North Carolinian bull’s-­eye.

Vernon, a keen observer of past planetary defense role-­playing games, wanted to make an important tweak. Previously, the players had been mostly scientists. The real world contains mostly nonscientists. “We didn’t want to do an exercise with just what we call ten-­pound brains,” he said. Winston-­Salem could be destroyed, but only on the condition that a diverse range of local officials could be players. Lewis and the dungeon masters eagerly agreed.

“It’s the first time in my life I’ve worked with the Applied Physics Lab,” Vernon told me. As excited, though, as he was to work with actual rocket scientists, his local community required a little more convincing. “I had to gently ease them into this,” he said of an incomparably dramatic and terrifying disaster. And on February 23, North Carolina and Maryland tried to stop it happening. The games had begun.

Day zero[5]. America didn’t know what was coming its way, because when the hypothetical asteroid 2022 TTX was discovered by a NASA-­funded survey on February 11, 2022, it looked almost harmless.

In this alternate timeline, astronomers from all over the world peeked at its observational data—­a dozen sky positions recorded over two nights—­posted up on the Minor Planet Center’s bulletin board, and nobody found any reason to be concerned. CNEOS’s Scout ruled out any impact in the next thirty days, so it was passed on to Sentry. It determined that there was no risk to Earth with one exception: six months into the future, on August 16, there was a one-­in-­2,500 chance of an impact, which is no different from many newly identified NEOs. But, just in case, astronomers kept up their observations of the faint speck as it scooted across the dark, a distant 37 million miles from home. After feeding this observation data to Sentry on February 16, the impact odds rose to 5 percent.

A 5 percent impact probability was somewhat uncomfortable. That the collision might just be half a year away was disturbing. And with just a smattering of observations, nobody knew where it might hit. The range of possibilities covered two-­thirds of the entire planet, including the Americas, Europe, Africa, and most of Asia. If it did find Earth, it might land in the ocean. But it might not. And based on how much sunlight it was reflecting, 2022 TTX was roughly 330 feet across—­a city killer, for sure. But it was also so faint and distant that astronomers couldn’t quite tell if it was small and very reflective, or big and not that mirror-­like. It was possible it could be 100 feet across, a small Tunguska. It could also be 1,000 feet long, a comfortable country crusher.

It’s an unenviable situation to be in. Think of it this way: you are faced with twenty doors, and nineteen of them are safe to open. But one of them, if opened, will free a monster that will devastate a random location on Earth. How confident do you feel that you will open the right door? There was, however, an element of calm at this stage. The asteroid had not yet been observed across enough of its solar orbit for scientists to know its trajectory with precision. “It is not yet possible to predict whether future assessments will indicate the asteroid will miss the Earth or hit, but the chances that the impact will eventually be ruled out are high,” the official report on 2022 TTX noted[6].

At this point during the exercise, a thought popped up: When do you wake up the US president in the middle of the night? This has been shown in movies plenty of times, and it does happen in real life when a huge disaster strikes anywhere on the planet, or when something seismic happens in the geopolitical realm. What would happen with an asteroid impact scenario? What impact odds, and what time-­until-­impact, would require someone to rush into the second floor bedroom of the White House to prepare the POTUS for a truly rude awakening?

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This is an excerpt from How to Kill an Asteroid by author and Supercluster contributor Robin George Andrews. The new book, a gripping account of the “city-killer” asteroids that could threaten Earth and the race to build a planetary defense system, drops today and can be ordered here.

There are approximately 25,000 “city killer” asteroids in near-Earth orbit—and most are yet to be found. Small enough to evade detection, they are capable of large-scale destruction, and represent our greatest cosmic threat. But in September 2022, against all odds, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission deliberately crashed a spacecraft into a carefully selected city killer, altering the asteroid’s orbit and proving that we stand a chance against them.

In How to Kill an Asteroid, award-winning science journalist Robin George Andrews—who was at DART mission control when it happened—reveals the development of the technology that made it possible, from spotting elusive asteroids and comets to figuring out their geologic defenses and orchestrating a deflection campaign. In a propulsive narrative that reads like a sci-fi thriller, Andrews tells the story of the planetary defense movement, and introduces the international team of scientists and engineers now working to protect Earth.

…………………………………………………………..

Robin George Andrews is a photographer, public speaker, and experimental volcanologist-turned-science journalist. He regularly writes about space and geosciences for outlets including the New York Times, Atlantic, National Geographic, Scientific American, and Atlas Obscura. He is also the author of Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond (Norton, 2021). He lives in London, England.

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NOTES

[1] “2022 Interagency Tabletop Exercise (PD TTX4).” Center for Near Earth Object Studies CNEOS. March 1, 2022. https://cneos​.jpl​.nasa​.gov/pd/cs/ttx22/.

[2] “ ‘Ask Not What Your Country can Do for Your . . . ’ ” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. https://www​.jfklibrary​.org/learn/education/teachers/curricular​-resources/ask​-not​-what​-your​-country​-can​-do​-for​-you.

[3] “We Are FEMA: Leviticus ‘L.A.’ Lewis.” FEMA, November 10, 2020. https://www​.fema​.gov/blog/we​-are​-fema​-leviticus​-la​-lewis.

[4] Wikipedia. “Winston-­Salem, North Carolina.” Wikimedia Foundation. Last modified December 1, 2023. https://en​.wikipedia​.org/wiki/Winston​-Salem,_North_Carolina.

[5] “2022 Interagency Tabletop Exercise.” CNEOS.

[6] “2022 Interagency Tabletop Exercise.” CNEOS.