CNN Breaking News

[Dave Land]

On Feb 25, 2008, at 2:10 PM, Curtis Burisch wrote:

> Lance A. Brown said:
>
>> The point of shooting the satellite was to disrupt the fuel  
>> storage.  If
>> the satellite came down in one piece, there is a chance the hydrazine
>> fuel on board would survive to reach the surface.  If it impacts on
>> land, you get nasty poisonous gas cloud.
>
>> If the missile did it's job, the fuel storage was destroyed.  The
>> satellite (or remaining parts) will still come down, but now the
>> hydrazine will burn up during reentry.
>
> This is indeed what they said, but frankly that's just a ludicrous
> statement. Hydrazine isn't fun, but nobody has cared before in the
> slightest about spacecraft with much bigger loads of un-burnt  
> hydrazine
> crashing to earth. Given the very remote possibility that this US
> spy-bird had crashed in a populated area, the negative effects of
> hydrazine landing on your head would be far less problematic than a
> piece of hurtling space junk tapping you on the head.
>
> The general consensus among many (e.g. www.theregister.co.uk)  
> appears to
> be that the US wanted simply to test their sat-interceptor systems,  
> and
> maybe make a bit of PR capital by flexing their muscles on the world
> stage.

I think it was also because some significant chunks of very new, very
secret technology might have survived reentry and potentially gotten
into the wrong hands.

BTW, I receive a link to a short video that shows the launch, a stage
separation and the moment of impact of the shoot-down:

mms://wm.ksdk.gannett.edgestreams.net/news/022108_deadsatellite_ksdk.wmv

Dave