Navy Claims Successful Strike on Dead Spy Bird
 

They said they hit it. It will take some time to know if they nailed the nearly full hydrazine tank which was the stated reason for spending tens of millions of dollars to knock it out in the first place.

Pretty cool trick, guaranteed to piss off the Chinese and other nations who'd rather not have their own birds at risk in a future conflict.

Fuck the Chinese. They've already killed a satellite and spread thousands of pieces of space junk.

Meanwhile the real reason for that strike is not about hydrazine. As soon as the USA 193 bird enters the atmosphere and makes the slightest hole in that hydrazine tank, then hydrazine is no a problem. Hydrazine is simply a fuel used to maneuver satellites. A fuel easilyl destroyed by heat during reentry. But this experimental spy satellite would contain numerous ultra secret optical technologies. If the bird enters intact, then many ultra secret components land on earth intact.

Rumors persist of another American satellite that landed in an unknown Middle East nation. Rumors also exist of covert American military operations to find parts that survived.

What is the possibility of that satellite coming down in a wrong country? 5%? A complete disaster for a secret bird. A bird in small pieces means those parts should not survive intact. Hydrazine, so obviously, was only a cover story.

A demonstration necessary because so much of the world fears space junk created by space weapons. Only the US wants to make space a future battleground. Same US government that also rewrote science to deny the problems of global warming, that also wanted to restart underground nuclear testing, and whose solution to energy prices is to consume more oil. Let's fill space with junk created by space weapons. Then space exploration only becomes a question of how long a satellite or space station survives before always suffering eventual destruction. Only the US (actually George Jr and his wacko extremist supporters) is not concerned.

IOW it is not the Chinese that need to be "fucked".

This is just stupid. In order to protect some secrets, the US is willing to take us one step closer to the heavens filled with deadly shrapnel.

20 years from now are we going to be talking about how great it was back in the olden days when we had weather prediction, GPS, TV, and telecommunications?

When something is taboo, like filling the heavens with deadly space junk, the psychological barriers to it are pretty strong. Those barriers have been lowered a significant amount with this stunt.

And because pictures are always fun, here's a map of the space junk NASA is aware of and is currently tracking in low earth orbit. The Navy just took one of these dots and turned it into many more smaller dots. Each one is shooting through space faster than a speeding bullet. A least since they are in low earth orbit, they will eventually rain down out of the sky.

And if you are up there with them, they will behave exactly like speeding bullets behave: punching a hole in you.

They waited until it was almost ready to hit the atmosphere to prevent it becoming a mess of bullets. The Chinese, however, killed theirs in high orbit.

Correct. I think it is a good thing they blew it to bits. No reason to let the Ruskies or Chinese get anything as easy as they got when the last Clinton was in office. Make them work for it, eh? :D

Give us a break will ya. You really don't believe that tripe do you. You seem like a really smart guy. Any thing up there gets burnned up fairly well if it tries to get through that thing called the atmosphere, anything below it fell into the water. The damm Chinese pour more crap into the oceans and skys on a daily basis then that one sat is going to do. Nothing wrong with protecting national secrets.

I agree that the hydrazine was not the primary reason for blowing this thing up. It was certainly, in varying degrees, a test of a system on a convenient target; it was an answer to the Chinese having demonstrated their own capabilities - showing them that if they took to killing our birds, we'd kill theirs. It was a warning to those who might want to lob ballistic missiles at us that there was at least a chance that we might be able to mount a functional defense. The fact that we could likely respond with overwhelming force of our own is implicit. Finally, and most importantly, there won't be enough recognizable pieces of the late spy satellite for anyone to recognize, let alone analyze, and people in Australia won't be finding chunks ala Skylab.

There will undoubtedly be more pieces of debris up there than there were before the shot. If you saw the video, or understand physics, you'll understand that a significant amount of debris was kicked into a higher orbit by the impact of the kinetic energy warhead. The higher the orbit, the longer it stays up there. But all in all, probably not the worst military decision ever made when all factors are considered.

I must agree. Good thoughts spode.

i think we should just challenge China to a Cock off before things get out of hand.

You know with our reliance on all things computer and on sats we are basically fucked. We need to re-study the wisdom of the neutron bomb.

Collect all the old gas station maps you can. You'll get rich when the GPS goes out.