 One useful mission for this near-term technology would be to deflect an asteroid that could collide with the Earth, depicted dramatically in the 1998 film "Deep Impact", even though it was a comet in that particular film.The extremely high performance would permit even a late launch to succeed, and the vehicle could effectively transfer a large amount of kinetic energy to the asteroid by simple impact, and in the event of an imminent asteroid impact a few predicted deaths from fallout would probably not be considered prohibitive.Also, an automated mission would eliminate the most problematic issues of the design