US cruiser nails crippled spy-sat on first shot

CO2

Well whatever the reason, they've spent more CO2 on this than Red, oops, Green Ken can hope to save even if he were to ban all cars from London.

I believe the Pentagon

They just happened to have this modified missile handy, on a cruiser in a suitable position in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the trajectory software was knocked up in a week when this super secret satellite "GallileoTargetPractice#1" failed to respond.

They then launched the missile trusting the new software wouldn't send it crashing into any populated area.

All to protect the earth from a satellite that could come crashing to the ground, damaging someones roof. Like a mini skylab.

Yeh, I'm totally sold on it.

Wheres the proof?

After all hoopla and hype, its inconcievable that Russians and Chinese would have let this opportunity go without filming, tracking, monitoring this shootdown. If they can film the shuttle 400 miles above all the way down, why not this one?

Any chance that it may have missed and the hype survived? Cmon YOUTUBE, where's the clip?? Any amateurs out there have a clip or two?

Should be fun watching it all!

The cost of loyalty

"The other effect of the interception is that the bits which did survive will mostly have come down along a track of the American government's choosing, mainly into the ocean or thinly-peopled nations closely allied to the US."

Is that what you get for being closely allied to the US? A pile of junk falling on your head from the outer space?

Momentum?

Maybe I'm being a bit dense here, but if the pieces of the broken satellite carried on the original trajectory, why would they lose orbit so quickly after being hit? Surely it couldn't have lost so much momentum for most of the pieces to lose orbit so quickly?

On another note, I'm surprised they pulled this off considering they've manage to miss a target the size of Mars before.

Shame

...I was hoping the Chinese or Russians would shoot it down before the Yanks, just for a laugh!

This morning the BBC was toeing the party line, about how the USA did this out of the kindness of their hearts so that we didn't get bits of debris falling on our heads, Chicken Little style.

And then they wonder why they're no longer taken seriously as a news source...

Fireball?

"He said that a "fireball" and a "vapour cloud" had been observed"

Do you get fireballs in a near-vacuum?

The real story

It was a complete fake - the proof being that they turned off the Moon (Lunar eclipse - a likely story) - so that there wouldn't be enough light to see that nothing happened.

Nitpcik

>... gaining domestic support for the troubled missile-defence programme - without

>whose hardware and knowhow the sat-shoot would have been impossible.

Didn't the Chinese do a similar thing with their (comparatively) low-tech gear ? (An adapted ICBM ?)

Double take

"The hydrazine story is just a diplomatic fiction, like the idea that Israel has no nuclear weapons"

Ehwhat?

At least we weren't dependent upon the Royal Navy

http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30100-1302053,00.html

Sorry old chap, can't do the satellite thingy, the damned fridge has had a bit of a prang.

But did they REALLY hit it?

GIven the US military's record for accurately hitting the target they're aiming at, can we really take their word for it that they hit it?

After all, this is the country that has trouble even hitting the right COUNTRY when they're dropping bombs (like the one that hit Sofia when they were trying to drop it on Belgrade.)

Any third-party verification?

Couldn't hit a barn door

Given the U.S. military's dismal track record in hitting (or rather, missing by a hundred miles) fast-moving targets with its interceptor missiles, I am deeply skeptical about any claims that they hit the rogue spy satellite.

Re: Do you get fireballs in a near-vacuum

> Do you get fireballs in a near-vacuum?

Yes, you can do. Rocket fuel either uses two chemicals that explode on contact or contain enough oxygen to burn.

one time

'intercept mission was a "one time event'

They've still for 2 'spare' converted missiles though...

RE: Momentum?

"Maybe I'm being a bit dense here, but if the pieces of the broken satellite carried on the original trajectory, why would they lose orbit so quickly after being hit? Surely it couldn't have lost so much momentum for most of the pieces to lose orbit so quickly?"

As far as I'm aware, the original satellite was losing speed / altitude due to atmospheric drag. The smaller sized remains of the satellite would have a higher surface-area:mass ratio, and would lose speed / altitude rather quicker.

@Momentum

It's all to do with atmospheric drag. Assuming you manage to make everything roughly

spherical, then the number of atoms you hit will goes up as r**2, whereas mass goes up

with r**3, so drag (force) goes with m**(2/3), and deceleration goes as 1/m**(1/3). Unless I've made a mistake in that maths, then if the break it up into a thousand pieces, then

they'll be decelerating 10 times faster at any given altitude. But, they're more likely to

actually manage to turn the box-shaped spacecraft into lots of flat things (e.g circuit boards, solar cells, ribbon cables, lenses, "if found, please return to" stickers, etc) so they'll be doing even better than that (compare the drag on a sheet of paper compared

to said paper in a ball).

Presumably the SM-3 releases a cloud of ball-bearings, or something like that,

to increase the hit-probability, rather than just being a well timed rock.. In which case it's more likely that there's going to be millions of pieces, not just thousands.

I remember hearing that the space station (with it's heavy shielding) could (just) survive being hit by something 1cm across (I guess at 7km/s, that's an average orbital speed).

I imagine a few hundred of those would turn the spy-sat into so much mangled mess even before reentry.

@AC- bbc towing the li(n)e

"This morning the BBC was toeing the party line, about how the USA did this out of the kindness of their hearts so that we didn't get bits of debris falling on our heads, Chicken Little style.

And then they wonder why they're no longer taken seriously as a news source..."

yes sadly the BBC aren't allowed to report the conspiricy theories or the imaginations that run rife on the internet...

the just retell what someone else has said before usually... sadly they gave up reporting the conspiricy therories after getting into that trouble that forced Greg Dyke to resign... (David Kelly stories)

Feeling left out?

How long before the Russians decide they need to show they're still one of the Big Boys then?

It's the Chinese

The Chinese shot down a satellite so the pinheads, I mean Americans, had to close the "satellite gap". Why they couldn't just say what they were doing is down to the American way, of being dishonest at all times.

Good day for Chinese missile scientists

The Americans have shown their seaborne anti-missile missile works perfectly given enough space to play with. So any Chinese military scientists looking for a cool billion or ten to build a submarine-launched solid-fuelled MIRVed missile will be to buy that Porsche after all.

Procession of the symbolic orders

When the official story bears no scrutiny whatever on a purely material level, one has to look at the symbolic angle. Especially as we find the BBC and Reg giving it such undue prominence.

Now, the US Navy already established its preeminence among the military services of the USA for hosting future military technologies a while back, so this little exercise could not have furthered that purpose. We can also dismiss the notion of a symbolic me-too - after all, if you are the USA you don't exactly need to ape China (you just inflate the $ a bit more).

This morning there was a total eclipse of the Moon. In fact 0326 was the moment of greatest eclipse, to within 1 minute. Coincidence? Hardly. When the Capi di Tutti want advice, in the absence of a convenient Alien Grey, they will ask an astrologer. And for an astrologer, there is no more significant moment than an eclipse. It does not matter a jot that astrology is mumbo-jumbo, as we are confident the USN's missiles are not powered or guided by voodoo. We decode the moment to understand its relevance - its meaning to the players.

I am advised there was a configuration called "mystic rectangle", involving the robust significators, organised auspiciously, focussed on resilience, but without the implied malevolence of for example 911. (As well, as I don't want the black helicopters crawling all over my roof). Overall connotations are of a military in control, rather than a social governance out of control. So, the possibility exists that this was a very special type of psy-op - one for the initiated, where the message is hidden in plain view.

A counter-psy-op, with the CIA as the target, seems plausible (if you've followed so far). But if the CIA exists as a physical entity, again we need to ask - who (or what) was the symbolic target?

I could of course be completely barking, and the invasion started 23 hrs 40 mins ago...

comments on various comments

@Jouni Leppajarvi - Nope. They used a left over Chinese New Year firework with a Beta-test version of Windows Vista as the destructive element. They scored a direct hit and proved two theories at the same time !!

1) The Chinese can do it cheaply !!

2) Windows Vista can destroy anything on contact !!

@Peter Leech - the chances of any rocket fuel, with oxygen in it, burning are slim to none. It's the ones WITHOUT oxygen that burns IN oxygen !!

@Steve - by the time the Americans got their anti-missile ready, the N. Korean missile will have hit Tokyo already !! Those places are NOT a million miles apart, you know, as the Russian Imperial Baltic Fleet discovered in 1905 !! So that theory is shot down like that in the main story !!

Missile Gaps

Let me see.

In about 1985 the Americans took out one of their own sats with a missile air launched from an F15 and maybe 300km up.

In about 2007 the Chinese out one of their own sats with a ground launched system and maybe 600km up

Now the Americans have 'proven' they can ground launch to 250km .

As for teh Royal Navy , their computer would have shown the sat as "friendly" so the missile would not have launched . The American computers have no such 'scruples' :)

I'd like to sell you a bridge

So-o. We're talking about a satellite here, yes? Now how was that satellite funded? The US government won't say. What does the satellite carry? Similarly, schtum.

But they will tell you some things. They'll tell you that the satellite's never worked. Interesting. We don't know what it's for but it's never worked. They'll tell you that they're shooting it down "due to the danger from the hydrazine fuel". What great humanitarians. The odds of the thing landing near humans are minsicule and even if it did, it would have to land on top of someone - or close by - for the hydrazine to do harm. And, lastly, they'll tell you - as AC already noted, that they just happened to have all of this kit and calculation ready when they decided to obliterate the thing.

So, do I believe that they actually shot it down? About as much as I believe their preparation to do so was, "a one time event ... not a capability that will be coming into service."

Ah well, no news

So, back to my satellite TV.

Hang on, where's the picture gone???

Lake Erie!

Ah, in the USN mode of naming warships after battles. (Cf. Lexington, Saratoga, Coral Sea) We have zapped the satellite, but it was ours!

A salute to the Great Leader??

It seems that the US have sold the Japanese several Aegis cruisers with anti-missile missiles for defense against the N. Koreans. This latest has several implications on that front:

1. The Japanese now know that their nice shiny anti-missile's software can be hacked to turn them into space weapons. Given that the Japanese public is not in favor of extending the battle space into ... erm, space, this should not go over well.

2. The US Navy had to make this shoot-down work. Otherwise the Japanese would feel that they had been sold a dud.

British friendly fire on allied troops

You asked for it, you got it!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3070875.ece

@ Anonymous Coward

Fair enough, I'm wrong.

My point about respect still stands

@Johnny Cobb

Look at you with your brain all sweaty. I just watched Idiocracy so I'm well amused at you. You realise when it says "enemies foreign and domestic" domestic doesn't mean beer, or immigrant labour. 911 is a joke, is one of my favourite Public Enemy songs.