Scifi story: private interests bribed management at JPL to scuttle the mission so they could send a secret mission to collect the loot for themselves... or protect their precious metal cartel from devaluation.
> When news of Orlean's sex scandal with her Supreme Court nominee Sheriff Conlon is exposed, she distracts from the bad publicity by finally confirming the threat and announcing a project to strike and divert the comet using nuclear weapons.
>The mission successfully launches, but Orlean abruptly aborts it when Peter Isherwell, the billionaire CEO of BASH Cellular and another top donor, discovers that the comet contains trillions of dollars worth of rare-earth elements. The White House agrees to commercially exploit the comet by fragmenting and recovering it from the ocean, using technology proposed by BASH in a scheme that has not undergone peer review.
>Orlean cuts Russia, India, and China out of the comet-mining deal, so they prepare a joint effort to deflect the comet, only for their spacecraft to explode. BASH's attempt at breaking the comet apart also goes awry and everyone realizes that humanity is doomed.
It was a major plot driver, but not the whole plot. You probably forgot it because the movie itself was forgettable.
The plot and writing was low-effort and lazy.
