US Missile Strikes US Spy Satellite

NY TIMES: A missile interceptor launched from a Navy warship has struck a dying American spy satellite orbiting 130 miles over the Pacific Ocean, the Pentagon announced late Wednesday.

Completing a mission in which an interceptor designed for missile defense was used for the first time to attack a satellite, the Lake Erie, an Aegis-class cruiser, fired a single missile on Wednesday night. Officials cautioned that while early information indicated that the interceptor’s “kill vehicle” had hit the satellite, it would be 24 hours before it could be determined whether the fuel tank with 1,000 pounds of toxic hydrazine had been destroyed as planned.

Was the reason we shot this thing down really because of a possible toxic fuel spill? Or is it that now we have proven to China that we can shoot down a satellite in space just like they did last year? I always thought that inoperable satellites and falling debris from space burned up as it reentered the atmosphere.

Steve Benen at Carpetbagger notes:

...Some experts said the military is seizing an opportunity to test its controversial missile defense system against a satellite target.

But others noted that the Standard Missile-3 has successfully been tested against warhead targets, which are far smaller than the satellite.

“There has to be another reason behind this,” said Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a liberal arms-control advocacy organization. “In the history of the space age, there has not been a single human being who has been harmed by man-made objects falling from space.”

An even closer look suggests most of the explanation for shooting the satellite down don’t hold up — the gas isn’t especially dangerous, and other hydrazine-filled objects have crashed on Earth to no effect.

The always-great Noah Shachtman quoted one military satellite observer saying, “Everything they said made sense except for the reason for doing the intercept in the first place.”

“The hydrazine tank is a 1-meter sphere containing about 400 liters of hydrazine. The stated hazard area is about 2 hectares, something like 1/10,000,000,000 of the area under the orbit,” he adds. The potential for actual harm in unbelievably small. Which means the hydrazine rationale just doesn’t hold up, literally not within orders of magnitude.”

“The cynic in me says that the idea that this is being done to protect the lives of humans is simply a feel-good cover story tossed to the media,” another veteran space security specialist adds. “It is true that hydrazine is very toxic and could result injury or death, but the odds of this happening are minuscule. The average person in American is many thousands of times more likely to be killed in a car accident than by any falling debris. In fact, no one has ever been killed by space debris (I have heard of one or two being struck but only minor injuries). So pretty much everything else you can think of (including getting hit by an asteroid/comet) is many times more likely than dying from this. Having the US government spend millions of dollars to destroy a billion-dollar failure to save zero lives is comedic gold.” […]

So what could that other reason be?

Our veteran space security specialist believes there are several. To him, the satellite shot is a chance for the military to try out its missile defense capabilities; a way to keep secret material out of the wrong hands; and a warning to the Chinese, after they destroyed a satellite about a year ago.

But the real kicker for me one line that gave me goosebumps in the Times article challenging Murphy's Law: "In the event that any of the hydrazine fuel falls on a populated area, the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Wednesday issued directions to communities on how to deal with dangerous debris from the satellite."

FEMA?! ...Holy shit.