Certainly, there has never been a nuclear bomb in space and never any nuclear explosion, right? The Space Treaty explicitly forbids it! Granted, but it was signed starting in 1967—long after the ...

A nuclear explosion might eventually be Earth’s only way to protect itself from a dangerous asteroid. But preparing for that without launching nukes into space means getting creative. One day ...

If a space agency were to successfully detonate ... Sandia National Laboratories only simulated the equivalent of a nuclear explosion on an asteroid-like material using X-rays, if such a device ...

The argon imploded, transformed into a superhot, electrically charged gas called plasma, which emanated a torrent of x-rays at the targets—simulating a nuclear explosion in space. The team ...

So what is the difference between a nuclear explosion on Earth and one in space? You’ve got that first fireball that just kind of vaporizes everything around it within a certain radius.

In space, this explosion looks quite different ... across the Pacific during the Starship Prime test. Depending on a nuclear explosion’s size and altitude, its EMP can wreak havoc on the ...

Credit: USGS To simulate a potent nuclear explosion in space, Moore and his team harnessed the most powerful X-ray generator on Earth. Nuclear bombs generate a massive amount of X-rays ...

During the height of the Cold War, the U.S. military and atomic scientists decided to fire some nuclear rockets into space. The goal wasn’t to see how much damage the nuclear explosions could do ...