The double episode of “Salvation” that recently aired revealed a new player in the drama surrounding the threat of an asteroid hitting the Earth. The Russians have, by the end of the two hours, destroyed any chance of breaking up the asteroid by ramming a repurposed space probe into it through the use of hacking. They have also stolen Darius’ EM drive, though they failed to get either of the researchers involved in the project. Liam, the MIT grad student, shot his faculty advisors, Dr. Croft, who turned out to be a traitor. What are the Russians up to?
Remember what breaking up the asteroid would cause
First, we need to remember what has been revealed so far. The official American government plan to stop the asteroid was to repurpose a space probe to ram the big rock, breaking it up into smaller rocks. The good news is that this would mean that the world would not be destroyed. The bad news is that a billion people in the Eastern Hemisphere would die in a rain of fire. No one at the Pentagon meeting where this was announced was crass enough to say, “I can live with that.” However, one imagines that more than one person thought it since it would solve so many geopolitical problems,
Naturally, the Russians, having found out about it through their intelligence network, were keen not to let that happen.
So they not only used a cyber attack to cripple the American space probe, but a Chinese, an Iranian, and an Indian probe that could have been utilized for the asteroid impact operation.
What about stealing the EM drive?
Actually, the gentle reader cannot be wondering about this one. By the end of the double episode, Liam and Croft had gotten the EM drive to work.
As long as Russia was running an operation in and around Darius’ facilities, they might as well steal technology that would change the way space travel is conducted. They had an asset in place, the traitorous and resentful Dr. Croft, so the operation should have been easy. The first thing the EM drive would be used for would be to save the world to the greater glory of Mother Russia.
The second point would be to establish total supremacy in space.
Of course, the Russian FSB has not managed to get Liam, who knows how the EM drive works and solved two crucial problems in getting the prototype ready. So as the rock of doom approaches Earth, Cold War-style spy games are taking place on the potentially doomed planet. In other words, the gentle reader really should be watching this show.