Before Bruce Willis diminished his star by acting in B-movies, he had certifiable blockbusters, like the "Die Hard" series and 1998's Armageddon. The latter had him chasing with shotgun buckshot all around a sea oil rig the unwanted lover of his daughter, characters played by Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler, respectively.

That film had Willis and Affleck leading a crew of misfits who were, nonetheless, the best in what they do. The mission: Drill a hole into an asteroid just miles away as it hurtles into Earth, threatening to kill every life form on the planet.

They're supposed to stuff a nuclear bomb into the drilled hole, so they can blow the country-sized rock into smithereens and avert a repeat of the Ice Age-spurring event that scientists say killed all the dinosaurs.

With Aerosmith's tear-jerker ballad "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" as soundtrack, the film climaxes with Willis sending off members of the crew, including Affleck, so he can ride in his lonesome to the space rock and manually detonate the bomb and save Earth.

With his life flashing before his eyes, especially priceless moments shared with his daughter, Willis sets off the bomb to save the day. It's Hollywood at its melodramatic best; a couple of hours' worth the price of the admission tickets.

This week, US space agency NASA breathes life into the science fiction peg of Armageddon as it attempts what has been described as a "feat humanity has never before accomplished," an operation to deliberately crash a spacecraft launched last November into an asteroid at 23,000 kilometers per hour.

NASA says it will livestream the impact between the car-sized DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft (7:14 p.m. Eastern Time, 2314 GMA) and Dimorphos, hoping to push it into a smaller orbit around the asteroid Didymos.

For us, earthlings, there's no reason to panic as the two asteroids do not pose any threat to Earth — not by any stretch of Carl Sagan's imagination, according to NASA. Didymos and Dimorphos, scientists maintain, loop around the Sun and passes about seven miles from Earth at their nearest approach.

Just seven miles, really? That's too close for comfort to non-rocket scientists like most of us are.