Satellite shooting....

[Bevo5]

Just reading this story on the BBC: Link


Eh..yeah? Isn't that kind of obvious? we want to show we can knock some **** out of the sky too. Pretty obvious to me that we're kind of looking forward to this.

Did any of y'all see the press conference? The general said some stuff like "We will try to re-configure an XYZ missle for a one-time only attempt..." Sounded like they had a bunch of people really trying to figure out how to reconfigure a missile to do this. Come on....

I'm looking forward to this.

 

[bedeviledegg]

Man, it's just high-tech skeet shooting. How can't you be excited about it? I just wish I could watch the entire thing from a lawn chair in the yard.

 

[Benson32]

interesting... one of my profs is a former NRO director, im going to ask him about this next week.

 

[dahobbs]

As I understand it, this isn't strictly speaking an ASAT mission. If the intercept occurs at the planned altitude, 100-130 miles, it'll be far short of what is typically considered ASAT range. The plan appears to be to shoot down the satellite just before re-entry to minimize debris. The SM-3 they'll be using is in fact an anti-ballistic missile, designed for theater ballistic missile defense. Just for comparison, the Chinese and earlier American ASAT tests occurred at altitudes well above 300 miles.

 

[Ag with kids]

We already proved we could hit a satellite with an ASAT in 1985...nothing more to show on that score...

But, the point is we want to hit it down low, so that the debris field orbit decays and then burns up quickly.

 

[washparkhorn]

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