He was referring to *South* Americans. Boy you guys living in the USA are sure paranoid.

"plenty of elbow room to fire their interceptor missiles up into the descending spacecraft's path"

And what happens to the ones that miss. It seems we're trading one bit of wayward satellite for lots of rocket-propelled live ordnance - no wonder they want people out of the area!

PH - the usual reasons.

send blokes up in the shuttle to paint a union jack or a picture of John Simpson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Simpson) on the satellite, then let the US air force know about it, im sure theyll find some way of blowing it up. and your troops don't have to come to your ally's country to explain why you did it whilst out on a jolly.

little bit of politics ladies and gentlemen, my name's ben elton, good night!

"Yes, the well-known inability of the American military to hit anything is what caused Hitler to successfully invade and conquer Britain back in the day, isn't it?"

err right? when was that? why was that? what did the yanks provide and when did the UK manage to finish paying them off? what did the usa pay for the jet engine? the merlin engine? that computer thing? and we get mac Donald's "friends" and W bush killing 100,000's of people. bring back Ronald Reagan, at least his dementia was bad enough that Nancey would see a clairvoyant to make major policy decisions.. bush coldn't think what to do for 15min's when told in public that 2 planes had slammed into the world trade center buildings. can he go weewee on his own?

Please guys, official units only.

Area

The standard unit of area shall be the nanoWales, defined as 1nWa, representing 0.0000207km2 or 20.78m2, 5.195 Thai talang wah or 28.99 Old Spanish square vara. The microWales, milliWales and Wales (Wa) are, naturally, accepted multiples of the base nanoWales.

* Football pitch = 194.89nWa

* Wales = 1,000,000,000nWa

* Belgium = 1.47Wa

* Democratic Republic of Congo = 113.3Wa

* Known universe (rolled out flat) = 19468502x1012x10256Wa

Example:

* The eruption of Vesuvius took out an area of 13 milliWales, although the effects of the blast were felt up to a thousand brontosauruses away. Survivors reported rocks and pumice the size of Bulgarian airbags falling from the sky for three days before the tragedy, and experts have calculated the total debris would fill around 120,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

"As it passes over the firing area, the satellite will be approximately 3,000 miles and ten minutes out from the western coast of Canada, the next land it will pass over. "

it *IS* only canada... eh :P

I do aircraft spotting for some lasers in Hawaii*, and at 0330 there's not much out there, other than possibly some flights eastbound from Asia for early-morning arrivals. Everything else tends to operate hours earlier, or take routes south and/or east of the satellite's ground track.

*If you have to ask, you don't need to know.

All the debris is supposed to fall out "within two orbits", so I suppose that means anywhere along the track. Following that pretty red line around the planet with Google Earth, the track goes right over East London.

Sorry to state the bleedin' obvious, but there's a damned good reason why it doesn't have a self-destruct capability.

It wouldn't be as much fun.

Waxproof jacket, green wellies, flat cap and bring round my Aegis destroyer with the hastily modified missiles please. I'm off to go *extreme* clay-pigeon shooting with me mates......

I've updated the KMZ file with more information from Ted. It includes pass information for the next couple of days and removes the SBX-1 NOTAM which I am unable to confirm.

Now my laptop won't boot any more.

What gives?

If they upgraded the AEGIS to Windows Vista...

So they're doing all this about ten minutes, orbital time, from my house? Won't even have time to duck and I'm having enough trouble sleeping as it is.... Friendly fire and civilians don't mix. Welcome to British Columbia, the Middle East of the Pacific.

Here's hoping the mods to the missiles retain the self destruct feature, small payload or not.

AC as I live way too close to the border and the US flies over lots.

Mine's the one with the Kevlar liner and the round hat.

Funny! So its not shot down then