U.S. official: Chinese test missile obliterates satellite

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by tw

Meanwhile, a second consequence of this launch is the fear (and rightly so) that has gripped Japan.

Most of Asia and even the US are getting pretty edgy right now.

China's leader declined he knew about it though, weird.

[Ronald Cherrycoke]

a warning to the world about what the United States opposes – does it fall on deaf ears? Did everyone realize how dangerous this space debris would be for all mankind? We are dependent on these birds. Already some have been lost – suspected of damage due to debris. In one case, it was believed the debris removed a solar array panel – only destroying a very expensive satellite.



Obiously an American fault...who would have thunk that?

[tw]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

China's leader declined he knew about it though, weird.

Those who view China (and others) as monolith would never appreciate what happens in China. Whereas the central party has trouble confronting corruption in the provinces, also the central party does not always understand what the People's Army is doing.

America had the same problem in early days of the cold war. Gen Curtis LeMay would routinely send American planes into the USSR with one intent: "We are already at war with the Soviets. Americans just don't know it yet". Gen LeMay intentionally wanted to turn the cold war hot - and stated it. It took a strong leader (Kennedy) to finally put a leash on LeMay. The story is legendary.

China most certainly has a same kind of 'big dic'. If China's leadership did not know about this test, then we all have something to fear. However if this test was only to get Americans to grab their scumbag president by his balls and address a world problem; then Chinese leadership only failed to appreciate how nervous that would make the Japanese. The latter is clearly the better alternative. We can only hope and watch.

[Ibby]

Originally Posted by tw

America had the same problem in early days of the cold war. Gen Curtis LeMay would routinely send American planes into the USSR with one intent: "We are already at war with the Soviets. Americans just don't know it yet". Gen LeMay intentionally wanted to turn the cold war hot - and stated it. It took a strong leader (Kennedy) to finally put a leash on LeMay. The story is legendary.

..."I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!"

[xoxoxoBruce]

Good, I hope they kill a bunch of satellites and create so much space junk it'll make it unsafe for man and machines for a long time. We'll go back to 1955 and start over. Stop looking at the damn Moon and use that money to fix shit here on Earth.
Then we'll have to work at getting along, protecting the earth, plus we'll have flying cars and chicken chow mien in every pot.

Oh and it'll thwart Dr Evil's plan to blow up the earth and escape to space.

[tw]

Orbiting Junk, Once a Nuisance, Is Now a Threat or have we now reached critical mass? From the NY Times of 6 Feb 2007:

The breakup was dangerous because the satellite’s orbit was relatively high, some 530 miles up. That means the debris will remain in space for tens, thousands or even millions of years.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by Ibram

..."I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!"

You bet!

And I am the only one here with guts enough to say that satellite was an asshole and had it coming?

[glatt]

Much more orbiting space junk today. On Tuesday, an Iridium and a Cosmos smashed into each other at thousands of miles an hour, destroying both and creating a cloud of debris. This is in fairly low orbit, around 500 miles. There are hundreds of satellites that orbit at that altitude and the new cloud of debris will endanger all of them now. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end for the Iridium phone system.

What are the damn odds that two satellites would collide? Space is huge.

The Pentagon and NASA are scrambling to assess the risk to spacecraft and the international space station from hundreds of pieces of debris created in the collision Tuesday of two satellites 491 miles above Siberia. NASA's initial estimate is that the space station faces a "very small" but "elevated" risk of being struck.

The situation is unprecedented. Scraps of spacecraft and other orbital junk have crashed together previously, but this was the first incident involving two intact satellites. One was an Iridium satellite launched in 1997 and used for the company's satellite telephone network; the other, a Russian Cosmos satellite launched in 1993, had been non-operational for a decade, NASA and Pentagon officials said.

.....

About 20 NASA satellites are in orbits that would take them close to the debris cloud, according to the space agency. But there are many hundreds of other satellites -- nearly 1,000 currently in operation, among some 6,600 satellites that have been launched since Sputnik in 1957, according to a 2007 estimate by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The military can track space debris as small as a baseball. The U.S. Strategic Command monitors 18,000 distinct pieces of debris, according to Reggie Winchester, spokeswoman for the command. That number will jump by at least 600, the preliminary estimate for the number of pieces from Tuesday's collision.

Even a very small object packs tremendous kinetic energy at orbital velocities, which are on the order of 17,500 mph. Humphries said the space station has "bumpers" designed to shatter an object into tiny pieces before it can penetrate the pressurized interior.

Said Humphries: "It gets down to probabilities. Space being very big, these pieces of debris being very small, the odds are very high that they're not going to collide."