Thread: I AM SO PROUD OF OUR NAVY

I'm glad China was watching - take notes! We shot it down in rough seas too. IN YOUR FACE CHINA!!! usa! usa!

BTW - when China shot down it's satellite - it landed in Australia and hurt people. Not that they cared, I'm sure.

Defense Department: Navy missile hits dying spy satellite

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Navy succeeded in its effort to shoot down an inoperable spy satellite before it could crash to Earth and potentially release a cloud of toxic gas, the Department of Defense said Wednesday.


A Delta II rocket lifts off, carrying a reconnaissance satellite that failed hours later.

The first opportunity for the Navy to shoot down the satellite came about 10:30 p.m. ET Wednesday. The plan included firing a missile from the USS Lake Erie in the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii to destroy the satellite.

"A network of land-, air-, sea- and space-based sensors confirms that the U.S. military intercepted a non-functioning National Reconnaissance Office satellite which was in its final orbits before entering the Earth's atmosphere," a Department of Defense statement said.

"At approximately 10:26 p.m. EST today, a U.S. Navy AEGIS warship, the USS Lake Erie, fired a single modified tactical Standard Missile-3, hitting the satellite approximately 247 kilometers (133 nautical miles) over the Pacific Ocean as it traveled in space at more than 17,000 mph." Watch a report on the successful shootdown »

It was unknown whether the missile hit its precise target -- the satellite's full fuel tank. The Department of Defense said it won't know for 24 hours whether the fuel tank had been hit.

"Debris will begin to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere immediately," the department said. "Nearly all of the debris will burn up on re-entry within 24-48 hours and the remaining debris should re-enter within 40 days."

However, even if the missile didn't score a direct hit, "any kind of hit provides a much better outcome than doing nothing at all," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Don't Miss
Shooting down spy satellite to cost up to $60 million
Shooting down satellite doesn't worry space crew
Time: Is shootdown really necessary
The missile didn't carry a warhead, with authorities saying the impact was expected to be sufficient to destroy the fuel tank.

Navy gunners had just a 10-second window to fire, and officials had said they might not be able to take their shot on the first opportunity. Earlier Wednesday, officials had expressed concern about weather conditions, saying the launch could be delayed. However, the 10-second window would have occurred on each of the next nine or 10 days. Watch Pentagon spokesman Jeff Morrell describe the launch window »

Officials had said the missile would not be fired until the space shuttle Atlantis landed, which it did Wednesday morning, to ensure the shuttle would not be struck by any debris from the destroyed satellite.

The attempt cost up to $60 million, according to estimates.

Without intervention, officials say, the satellite would have fallen to Earth on its own in early March. However, since it malfunctioned immediately after it was launched in December 2006, it had a full tank -- about 1,000 pounds -- of frozen, toxic hydrazine propellant. Watch how the falling satellite could spark fears »

The fuel tank probably would have survived re-entry if the satellite had fallen to Earth on its own. That could have dispersed harmful or even potentially deadly fumes over an area the size of two football fields. Hydrazine is similar to chlorine or ammonia in that it affects the lungs and breathing tissue.

The Chinese military destroyed an aging weather satellite last year, prompting questions about whether the United States is merely flexing its muscle to show an economic and military rival that it can destroy satellites, too. James Jeffrey, deputy national security adviser, denied that this week, saying, "This is all about trying to reduce the danger to human beings."

In 1989, a U.S. fighter jet destroyed a U.S. satellite by firing a modified air-to-air missile into space from an altitude of 80,000 feet. That adds to evidence that the U.S. acted Wednesday strictly to guard against the prospect of a potential disaster, said Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The military timed its shootdown attempt so that resulting debris would tumble into the atmosphere and not interfere with other satellites, said Christina Rocca, a U.S. diplomat and expert on disarmament. Her comments were included in an online United Nations report on this month's Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland. See dangers and possible solutions to satellite problem »

The military also timed its efforts to minimize the chances that debris would hit populated areas. But the United States is "prepared to offer assistance to governments to mitigate the consequences of any satellite debris impacts on their territory," according to a report of Rocca's remarks on the Web site of the Geneva office of the U.N.

One Pentagon official said that since early January, a team including 200 industry experts and scientists had worked furiously to modify the Aegis air-defense missile system so it could shoot down the satellite. Among the team's challenges was modifying the sensors designed to detect the heat from an incoming warhead, as the satellite will be much cooler.


The missile was to release a "kinetic kill vehicle," enabling it to "see" the satellite and adjust its course toward it if necessary, officials said.

In January 2007, China used a land-based missile to destroy a 2,200-pound satellite that was orbiting 528 miles above the Earth. The impact left more than 100,000 pieces of debris orbiting the planet, NASA estimated -- 2,600 of them more than 4 inches across. The U.S. agency called the breakup of the Fengyun-C satellite the worst in history.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/02/2 ... index.html

Of course, some loser at time had to criticize. I guess we should just surrender to China right now according to him.

It's a measure of how peacefully human beings have used space in the 50-plus years we've been traveling there that we're a whole lot better at putting things into orbit than we are at blowing them back out. That, of course, is a function of practice. Thousands of pieces of machinery have been lofted into space since the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and almost all of them have either tumbled back down on their own or simply remained in orbit.

Special Reports
Top 50 Space Moments Since Sputnik
On the 50th anniversary of the Russians' first successful space launch, TIME's Jeffrey Kluger looks at the high and low points of man's half-century adventure into space
Related Articles
Spacecraft Falling! Get Set to Duck?
A U.S. spy satellite is expected to crash back to Earth as early as next month. Another thing to worry about? Not quite

Is This Satellite Shootdown Necessary?
In a week in which Russia and China called for a treaty banning weapons in space, the Pentagon has a...
Spacecraft Falling! Get Set to Duck?
If you’re the kind inclined to worry, here’s a real hand-wringer for you: Sometime as early as Febru...
Diamonds in the Sky
China’s successful antisatellite-missle test Jan. 11 carries potential implications for the interna...
The New Space Race: China vs. the U.S.
Both the U.S. and China have announced intentions of returning humans to the moon by 2020 at the ear...


This week, the Pentagon is going to try something different. On Wednesday evening at 9:30 PM (EST), weather permitting, it plans to launch a sea-based missile at a crippled satellite gliding 150 miles overhead, in a $60 million attempt to blast it out of the sky before it can tumble home and hurt someone. It'll be a neat little feat if the military planners succeed — but that won't mean they're telling the whole truth about why they're bothering in the first place.

The clay pigeon in the military's cross hairs is an unnamed, 5,000-lb. spy satellite that was launched in 2006 and never quite got its purchase in space, suffering a malfunction almost immediately upon its arrival in orbit. Comparatively low-orbiting craft like this one tumble back to Earth faster than high-orbiting ones, as the upper wisps of the planet's atmosphere produce increasing amounts of drag, pulling the object lower and lower. This one's on a trajectory that will cause it to begin its terminal plunge sometime in March, sending it on a fiery descent that should entirely — or at least mostly — incinerate it.

So why make the effort at such a complicated bit of sharpshooting just to bag a target that's coming down anyway? The Pentagon says it's all about safety. Five thousand pounds of out-of-control satellite can do an awful lot of damage if it drops on the wrong spot. What's more, this particular satellite is carrying a 500-lb. tank of frozen hydrazine fuel — nasty stuff if you're unlucky enough to inhale it. Striking the ground at reentry speed, the gas could immediately disperse over a patch of ground as big as two football fields.

None of this, however, is likely to happen. For one thing, 70% of the Earth's surface is water. Even considering that the flight paths of most satellites are designed to carry them over as much land as possible, that's still a lot of uninhabited square mileage lying below. NASA acknowledges that 3,000 satellites and 6,000 pieces of space debris are currently circling the planet — a pretty huge swarm of potentially incoming rubbish to justify devoting so much attention to just one.

The hydrazine argument is similarly suspect. It's extremely hard for a spacecraft component to survive reentry even if you want it to. The scientific experiments carried aboard the Apollo lunar modules were powered by radioactive fuel, which was itself encased in heavy ceramic just to ensure that it would survive such an accident. Even then, there were white knuckles whenever one flew since the risk existed that an uncontrolled reentry would crack the cask and leak radiation. The hydrazine tank — a hollow vessel — is nowhere near as robust and is unlikely to make it through the heat and aerodynamic violence of the plunge that awaits it, meaning that it will spill its contents high in the atmosphere, where it will represent barely a breath of gas that will disperse harmlessly.

The more believable explanation for the planned duck hunt is that it is an exercise in politics rather than safety. Washington was none too pleased in January of 2007 when China shot down one of its own weather satellites after it had outlived its usefulness, a bit of technological sword-rattling that proved it could target any other nation's orbiting hardware with equal ease. Beijing too made vague claims of worrying about the public weal, but Washington saw the act more as the political statement it probably was, and concluded — correctly — that American spy satellites are not quite as safe as they once were. An American shootdown would be one way to return the gesture. The timing is particularly suspicious since Russia and China issued a joint condemnation of the militarization of space only days before the Pentagon went public with its plans. While Beijing's sudden pacifism is hardly credible after it own exercise in cosmic skeet-shooting, neither is the Washington's insistence that there is no linkage between the two events.

Another possibility is that the Pentagon is indeed nervous about something aboard the satellite, but it's not the tank of fuel. Spy satellites are, by definition, made of secret hardware, and nothing so pleases one military power as the chance to seize and pick over the technology of another. Should American camera and communications components fall into the wrong hands, whatever tactical advantage was gained in developing them would be lost.

No matter the reasons for the planned exercise, the Pentagon is hardly likely either to stand down now or to change its explanation. And what if the outward-bound missile misses the inward-bound target? Then the satellite will simply reenter on its own next month — with the only thing entirely incinerated being the $60 million the failed exercise will have cost.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article ... 11,00.html