Didn't America complain that China was causing a mess in space by shooting at things in orbit.... yet another case of "Its wrong if you want to do it, but if its me and for the good of me then its fine".

Paris is confused by this.. obviously.

instead of worrying about hydrazine or secret technology, they've simply decided it makes a good excuse for testing how good they are at destroying orbiting satellites?

That it isn't really a satellite - just a cover story to attack the lizard army's main base

So the US government is concerned about the potential loss of life from a falling satellite but it doesn't stop them from dropping ordinance on civilians, allied troops, et al.

The pressure is on for them now to be able to hit their target, but if they miss they could always ask the Chinese to hit it for them, couldn't they? ;)

Paris icon, because only she would believe the BS story they've concocted...

Speaking as a chemist: BS

I would expect that the heat of re-entry would definitely cause the hydrazine to explode while still high in the atmosphere.

It would be so cool if they put a camera on the missile so we could watch it on YouTube afterwards - would be like watching the footage on CNN of the Gulf War (but without all the death this time). Of course, if they miss, then I guess we won't see it!

So the article says the satellite orbits the earth every 90 minutes - how fast is the satellite moving? Also I know nothing about military weapons, what will they use to "lock on" to the satellite, radar lock?

Paris Hilton icon because I'm probably as dumb as her when it comes to space things.

Bet you a fiver a spokesperson of the US Navy will be on TV next week using the words 'regrettable' and 'misidentification'.

The recent news that the Iranians are planning their own spy sat would have no bearing on the Septics being eager to show off their anti-sat capability....

How many millions of dollars for the wasted satellite, and how many more to modify a missile and mobilize the effort to shoot it down... People starving, working for minimum wage, no health care, blah blah blah. You get the idea. It just makes me a little sick.

Please please please, leave it alone. The tiny chance of the thing falling out of the sky and hitting the ebay headquarters is just too good a chance to miss!

I think it's hilarious - if I were them I wouldn't have boasted about it. The world is watching for failure now. Clever move would be to try it, and it if failed, deny all knowledge. If successful, you look good. Personally I'm bracing myself for Sky One to suddenly go blank...

Our satellite's re-entrification has been misunderestimated so we're firing off our ballisticified missiles to spatially destroy-ify the satellite so it doesn't endangerous the good people of America.

Well... I do not go along with the whole "dangerous and deadly hydrazine" and "saving poor people from falling debris" thing.

This is definitely about protecting the secret technologies and international prestige.

The big difference is that shooting down a satellite that is orbiting at 540 miles creates A LOT of debris that will orbit the Earth for a very long time (China) and shooting down this spy-bird at approx 130 miles where most of the garbage will fall back to Earth within matter of days/few weeks.

And I don't really think that US has to do this as an answer to China. US had the ASAT technology in mid 80s. Look up the ASM-135 ASAT & F-15 combo platter :)

Anyway.. hopefully someone will at least record the SM-3 launch and post it somewhere... because that will be the only exciting part of the "shoot down". If there is a successful interception then all you will get on the news will be some color blobs from the IR seeker on the kill-vehicle and that will be it.

Still looking for the IT angle...

Bullseye a direct hit.... wait a minute we still have contact with the spy sat, so what did we hit?

is it

a ) The hubble telescope.

b ) A Foreign embassy.

c ) A random patch of desert in Iran we can now claim contained WMD.

d ) The only bridge out of Springfield.

There is probably another political aspect, having to do with a bureaucratic squabble within the U.S. military.

There is a view within the military that space is going to be militarized to some extent with the next couple of decades. This is setting off a bit of a contest to decide which of the service branches will lead the way. Obviously, the Air Force --- whose greatest nightmare is the creation of a new "Space Force" service arm --- would like to be anointed with space leadership. This is the principal reason for the AF's enthusiasm for space-related programs of dubious value and effectiveness, such as NMD. Missile defense, doesn't have to work, it just has to exist and be big and have space-related assets, so that when the decision to move weapons into space is made, the Air Force can argue that they are essentially already there, so why duplicate their effort instead of just expanding their existing mission?

Naturally, the Navy has some reservations about its relegation to the damp bits of the Earth. So it is interesting to see that they have succeeded in grabbing this mission, which could otherwise have been carried out by the AF with one of their F15-launched sat-killers --- tested successfully in the '80s, with spares presumably warehoused somewhere. I bet there were some very watchable bureaucratic knife-fights involved in getting the Navy this assignment

Then you unfortunately miss your target and zap their satellite links...

Mine is the heavy grey overcoat covered in lead..... and if you can't see me head then it's because it's between my knees kissing my arse goodbye....

Hydrazine boils at 114 degrees centrigrade, and has a flash point at just under 38 degrees. So the US are trying to tell me that there is a serious risk of making it back to earth after a re-entry on a space-craft without a heat shield? When the shuttle explodes leaving no debris just because of a heat shield being hit by some foam?

Of course the US is hiding something. It makes you wonder whether the "broken" satellite is actually some sort of stealth satellite, and the shooting down exercise is going to correspond with the point it disappears off radar and starts doing more naughty things?

A very relevant and well thought out point.

Join the US Navy and help their shouting people straight away.

Coat? Yes please, the one with the tin hat in the pocket please.

"Maybe it'll become a new olympic sport?"

Think of it as a really rather expensive variation on skeet-shooting. :)

I'm sorry, Mr. Gates can't take your call right now, he's out playing Missile Command. For real.

Hey, I just had a great idea! Let's tell Steve Ballmer that the satellite is a Google-sponsored project running Linux, and then put him in a strategically placed location with a few thousand office chairs. SUCSESS!!1!

The airborne laser can fire upwards as well as the mirrors are multi-axis nose mounted, Re-assembly of the COIL laser began in October 2007 in preparation for aircraft integration beginning in early 2008. Just in time to test it on the fuel tank of this.

what i think is going to happen is that they are going to launch a missile at the "malfunctioning" sat then it will shoot the missile down and they will have a successful test!

"When the shuttle explodes leaving no debris"

Or, if you live in our reality, lots of debris spread out over several states, including human remains found in Texas...

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/02/01/shuttle.columbia/index.html

If you're that concerned about them missing, just send up a shuttle filled with British and Canadian soldiers and park it next to the spy sat.

I know what you're thinking but it won't work.

Simply placing the satellite between the shuttle and whatever loose cannon they put in a plane to destroy it, will do nothing to prevent the destruction of the shuttle itself.

I'm afraid American's having an unerring accuracy when it comes to killing their allies.

I would be more concerned about whether the exploding shuttle would be enough to get the job done. Perhaps they should pack a couple of decent sized bombs in the cargo hold just to be on the safe side.

They'll never hit it. No chance of predicting the exact real-time trajectory of a falling satellite while hoping the intercepting missile will hit the target.

I just hope and pray it isn't a heat-seeking job. It'll hit Noo Joisey.

"The US Navy will attempt to shoot down a ... satellite" is GWB's cowboy terminology. the Navy will do no such thing. What the Navy will do is attempt to break up the satellite so that, as it *continues* to fall into the atmosphere, most of the pieces are destroyed by reentry friction.

The fact that the USA currently has an illiterate chimp in the White House, shitting out press releases, does not remove the obligation that journalists have to check facts and attempt to use proper terminology. I wouldn't expect that of *\_The_Sun_'s hacks, but El Reg usually does a better job.

They fire off a missile from down here in vaguely the right direction, and then they get to test whether their old orbiting satellite-killers are still working.

...we have truly entered, and are now living in, the Age of Incompetence.

And since I live within the continental USA, I cannot even make an

online wager w/respect to the outcome.

Sidebar: Perhaps the USA government should allow all of the different

uniformed services to take a shot at the sat, with any successful

contender to win an additional billion dollars in funding.

- The Garret

"Nonetheless, it was confirmed that the warships would not fire until the space shuttle Atlantis returns to Earth on 20 Feb."

Why can't the shuttle intercept the malfunctioning satellite and give it a microsoft moment(turn it off and on again).

So we have one SM3 Missile with a 28 lb odd (14kg) solid shot kinetic warhead which is designed to strike and punch neat round holes in compact precision assembled nuclear warhead of say 2 foot diameter at 100 miles up travelling at some 7000 mph and shatter the re entry heat shield at the same time !

Thus hitting such a larger object like the Lacrosse Satellite is never a problem !

Now we have a a very large 2300kg cylinder some 10 foot in diameter and 20 foot long rotating in three dimensions due to a combination of very thin air drag , solar winds and the earth's gravity well and magnetic fields acting upon the heavier end and the deployed radar array acting a bit like a friction aero brake of sorts ! So in the last two years it will not only be rotating but also tumbling/twisting end over end as it is free to move in three dimensions ! Remember all Newton's laws of motion also apply too ! So essentially a slingshot stone will have minimal effect on a travelling boulder , and a shot gun even less so as the shrapnel will rip little holes through the non resistant thin exterior fabric !

It is a given to save weight the exterior will be made of a combination of ultra thin aluminium and gold foil with a sections covered in fragile ultra light weight solar cells , so the the terminal warhead will literally punch a number of fist size holes straight through from one side to the other at random which may or may not hit the hydrazine fuel tanks within the satellites body dependent on the time of impact and relative to the bodies motion in three dimensions !

However one can not ignore the fact that current Aegis Cruisers with have a finite limit on the number of silo launched SM3's and after x number of rounds the gun is empty and have a limited firing arc to intercept window given the terminal velocity of the satellite and the fixed range of the missile , it's time to terminal velocity and fixed maximum range and time to fire from target acquisition on board ships computers calculating range and shoot numbers before it drops below the horizon very quickly as everything is relative !

As Paris would say "Duck and Cover , Nuts to the moron that thought this one up !"

Dont be a spoil sport now and shoot the thing down. You can bid on it on ebay too. Its a democrocy remember.

Err... they may have got vista running the damn aegis system now, perhaps they have realised it might be good idea to see if actually can work.

Can any one imagine what's in the Standard Missle 3's brain? "Specially modified software" zOMG must be the new vista patch! That pwnz0rrrz!!one!!eleventeen

Seriously folks, on that night, I'd try and find out if an aegis cruiser was likely to be remotely near you. If so, err hide maybe..

@JonB. If any yank debris falls over my fair county of Cork because of your lame arse suggestion they shoot it down over Ireland I shall personally come over and kick you in the knackers and walk on your face:P

Paris Hilton Icon. For all the paris hilton parts and peeps in the USN.

The shuttle is in the wrong place to intercept the satellite given its limited fuel supply - space is quite big when you come to think of it. Same applies to e.g. the Mars rover...

So does this mean there's going to be a new space race? to annex the lagrange point?

And I'll have to go help bail uncle sam out again...

On that starry night,

look to the moon,

but you will not find me there any time soon.

look to the sea,

but it will most certainly be not me.

look to the clouds

you will find nought about.

But look to the sky,

*CRUMP*

Boom, Headshot !!(satellite)

*CRUMP*

Boom, Headshot !!(SM3 missle)

FPS Doug t3h 0G Pwnz0r3rrr

Don't sell the parts on eBay! Thats what they want you to do, they would then just pull the auction, get all your details from your account and raid your house.

You have to sell it on the black market, getting in touch with an agent from whichever country you think deserves it would be the best option. Though the Brit spooks would probably just hand the pieces straight back to the US, so someone else would have to do. If you were greedy and/or like Putin, Russia would probably give the best price.

looking at the ground track of the satilite it never passes over American soil... it skirts up the Atlantic seaboard and over Greenland.....

@AC - Skeet shooting..

Bill G - What did you guys do at the weekend?

Steve J - Scored a couple of birds over the Eastern Seaboard...

Larry E - He was always a better shot than me..

If they used a nuclear device to do this they wouldn't have to be as close and all the hydrazine would be gone. You laugh but knowing these people are you sure they wouldn't.