Am I the only one who thinks yesterday's shooting down of a dead spy satellite was intended to show off U.S. weaponry? Experts claim there was only a very slight chance the craft would land in a populated area or cause some kind of toxic cloud, so I have to think this was a case of a $40 million dollar "look what we can do" and a little bit of "beware" sprinkled in.
Have you seen the video? It's sweet. It looks like the Death Star blowing up.
5 comments:
If they have that much money to waste I want more than $1200 back...
The cover story was thin - that the hydrazine tank would survive reentry and come down in a populated area. I don't see the hydrazine tank surviving reentry from space (regardless about what they said about their experience with the Shuttle fuel tank), and the chances that the satellite would hit land was around 25% (three-quarters of the Earth is water), and the chances that it would come down in a populated area was nil (it's hard to comprehend how much of the Earth's land surface is wide open space). There was something on that satellite that our government didn't want to survive and be recovered that made them risk the embarrassment of a multi-billion dollar, ongoing investment failing in return for the small upside of a seemingly pointless success.
Matt, I like your thinking. You are on to something I suspect.
We have enough problems with our own people giving secrets away (for $) we don't need our technology falling into the hands of our competitors. This has happened countless times before (I know of UAVs-Unmanned Aerial Vehicles crashing and then the bad guys recovering them). The bad guys do the re-engineering and then presto, they have their own. I'd blow it up too before the bad guys got a hold of it.
Reagan's Star Wars concept has proved to Rule!
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