Navy kills spy satellite... I love the U.S. military!

[Lyte]

One shot... one kill!

There's a video clip on our home page. I love the U.S. Navy! This really is an amazing accomplishment. That satellite was going like 17,000 miles per hour.... 17,000 miles per hour... and we hit it on the first try!!

U.S. Navy Missile Hits Spy Satellite
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN
February 21, 2008 10:16 a.m.

WASHINGTON – A Navy missile soaring 130 miles above the Pacific Ocean smashed a dying U.S. spy satellite late Wednesday night and appears to have destroyed a tank carrying 1,000 pounds of potentially lethal rocket fuel, bringing a dramatic end to a weeks-long controversy over the military's unusual decision to shoot down one of its own satellites.

Pentagon officials said they were optimistic that the missile had struck the satellite, which had stopped working almost immediately after entering earth orbit in December 2006. But they said that U.S. officials needed time to assess whether the strike had also destroyed the satellite's supply of hydrazine, a toxic fuel that causes lung damage and can be lethal if inhaled in large enough quantities.


A missile is launched from the USS Lake Erie to take out a nonfunctioning U.S. spy satellite.

"A network of land-, air-, sea- and spaced-based sensors confirms that the U.S. military intercepted a non-functioning National Reconnaissance Office satellite which was in its final orbits before entering the earth's atmosphere," the Pentagon said in a written statement. "Confirmation that the fuel tank has been fragmented should be available within 24 hours."

Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon press conference Thursday that he couldn't rule out that hazardous material would fall to the earth. "Thus far we've seen nothing larger than a football," he said.

Wednesday's strike marked the first time that a U.S. missile designed to defend against incoming enemy warheads was instead used to bring down a satellite. It was a significant technical achievement for the U.S., which hasn't carried out a similar high-altitude strike against a space-based target since the Cold War.

The successful effort to destroy the dying satellite is a boon for missile-defense advocates and could boost the flagging political support for the costly effort to design a system capable of shooting down ballistic missiles launched by rogue nations such as North Korea.

The decision to shoot down the satellite carried high stakes for the U.S., and a failure to actually destroy the satellite would have been proven deeply embarrassing for the American military. The U.S. was caught off-guard last year when China used a missile to bring down a malfunctioning weather satellite, and some American officials have long worried that the U.S. was falling behind in the space arms race.

News of the strike is almost certain to further strain relations with rising powers like Russia and China, which have long accused the U.S. of developing a new generation of antisatellite weapons.
SM-3 missile hit a dead spy satellite that was on a collision course with Earth. If the missile had hit the ground, the fuel could pose a significant health threat.

Within hours of the reported success, China said it was on the alert for possible harmful fallout from the shoot-down and urged Washington to promptly release data on the action.

"China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said at news conference in Beijing. "China requests the U.S. to fulfill its international obligations in real earnest and provide to the international community necessary information and relevant data in a timely and prompt way so that relevant countries can take precautions."

Many Chinese analysts have noted that the Bush administration had strongly condemned the earlier Chinese strike against its weather satellite.

In the days before the missile launch, the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the U.S. of testing the missile's capabilities as a weapon against other nations' satellites.

U.S. officials denied that the attempt to bring down the satellite was an effort to test whether conventional missiles could work as antisatellite weapons, and insisted that the strike was a one-time event. The officials also said there was no truth to the persistent speculation in many military and science blogs that the strike had an ulterior motive: destroying the satellite's classified surveillance equipment to ensure it didn't fall into the hands of another country.

Instead, U.S. officials said that the strike was solely motivated by concerns that the satellite carried enough hydrazine to contaminate an area the size of two football fields and potentially kill those near the crash site. Critics, however, pointed out that no one has ever been killed by falling space debris or by a hydrazine spill.

Wednesday's strike began at around 10:26 p.m. EST, when the USS Lake Erie, which had been tracking the falling satellite, launched a modified SM-3 missile at the bus-sized object as it entered the earth's atmosphere. The missile struck the satellite about three minutes later as the spacecraft traveled in polar orbit at more than 17,000 mph.

Because the satellite was orbiting at a relatively low altitude at the time it was hit by the missile, debris will begin to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere immediately, the Pentagon statement said.

"Nearly all of the debris will burn up on re-entry within 24-48 hours and the remaining debris should re-enter within 40 days," it said.

The use of the Navy missile amounted to an unprecedented use of components of the Pentagon's missile defense system, designed to shoot down hostile ballistic missiles in flight -- not kill satellites. All told, the effort cost more than $60 million.

The government organized hazardous materials teams, under the code name "Burnt Frost," to be flown to the site of any dangerous or otherwise sensitive debris that might land in the U.S. or elsewhere.

Also, six federal response groups that are positioned across the country by the Federal Emergency Management Agency have been alerted but not activated, FEMA spokesman James McIntyre said. "These are purely precautionary and preparedness actions only," he said.

[tazz]

ya, what are they hidding?

[Lyte]

Hey Tazz,

Welcome!

"They" as in the Navy? Oh, I'm sure there's some secret stuff on that satellite they don't want others to see! Regardless of why they shot it down, it was still one hell of shot!

Lyte