NASA’s plucky DART spacecraft was sent to do nasty things to the tiny asteroid moonlet Dimorphos. It accomplished its mission yesterday, Sept. 26, 2022. The big event was part of research into planetary defense — the effort to find a way to prevent a future earth-hunting asteroid from ruining our collective day by impacting the planet and throwing several hundred million tons of vaporized dirt, rock and humans into the atmosphere.

Throughout the approach and aftermath of DART’s attack on Dimorphos, NASA scientists and media commentators rightly lauded the high-tech effort and all the planning and precision that went into it.

But what about the actual attack on Dimorphos? Was that done using some kinda’ high-tech energy weapon recently developed in a lab? Some “pew-pewing” Star Wars laser?

Nope. This attack was no more sophisticated than the stone cannon balls blasted at the walls of Constantinople in 1453 from the siege guns of the Turks who really wanted in. No more sophisticated than the iron cannon balls fired by the English at the lumbering ships of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

DART smashed into Dimorphos using a technique brought to us by centuries of gunpowder: the simple collision of a solid projectile hitting the broad side of a barn. Boom.

Who needs fancy “pew pewing” when you’ve got classical physics? Sit down Albert and Herr Heisenberg, Sir Isaac says, “I got this.”