Anybody else not believing a word fo the government BS about this? Hydrazine? Unless my math is way off, reentry should generate more than enough heat to burn off the hydrazine. Large parts impacting land? MIR was 4 or 5 times the size of this satellite, and most of it burned up just fine. Whats up here? The government is willing to risk creating an enormous debris field in space to hide something in this case.

Perhaps unrelated but perhaps not: The Russians have reportedly overflown our carrier groups TWICE in recent weeks, after not having done so in YEARS. Maybe nothing, maybe a warning not to let whatever is on that satellite land on their territory.

Also, if this isn't an ASAT test, what the Hell is?

I'm very concerned here. I hope that I'm being paranoid, but I smell something, and it isn't hydrazine.

Yeah...something not right about this, I don't understand why they wouldn't let just burn up in the atmosphere. I'm sure MIR had tons of stuff in it that was terrible for us, but they just let it burn up...


EDIT: also this is getting us in even more international shit.

http://www.iht.com...02/18/asia/spy.php

This is a test. This is only a test. 'Cept it's not a test. It's us showing off.

The Russians are getting noisy again, China is showing off, so we roll out our cool new tech and shoot down a satalite. Just to show we can with our cool new toy. Can't have someone thinking they are the only one with the ability to fuck up comm+cont world wide by filling the obital space with high speed bits of scrap.

It's stupid. And pointless. And only being done because the ChiCom did it last month. Try not to read more into it.

Every time the shuttle goes up for maintenance for a satellite, they're not just checking essential operating systems.
These things carry data recording devices. I'm sure we're all pretty familiar with that, they have hard drives just like your computer that you're using to look at this website. What they do, or so I'm told is that they download or swap out the disks, then they're turned over to the NSA or CIA or whichever agency receives this material.
This is the main reason, at least in my opinion, why we shot that satellite down. NASA couldn't get the data off of it, they couldn't get the disk or the drive or whatever out of it, so they blew it up to destroy the data because...we all know this too...we use those satellites to spy on other countries, not to mention our own people.
Sure, it made for a nice "Don't fuck with us" showing for the Chinese, but that was a side benefit.

Shael

This 'tactical event' was strictly showbiz. The subtext reads like this: 'Go ahead...we've already done it, and we can do it again. Let us know when you get close to doing what we did first.'

I like the swapping disks idea myself.

heres what i think: i think that the shootdown was obviously if not a test then a show that we do indeed have something that can shoot another something from space. thats a very dangerous purposal anyway you put it. maybe something goes wrong with another country and someone, on either side shoots down a sensitive satilite and everything falls apart. look at how dependent we have become on all of it, you cant even make a phone call without it being bounced off a satilite. now if you went to make that same call and someone shot the satilite down....well, what would you get? probably nothing. not even a dial tone. that alone is scary. banks would be in trouble and businesses wouldnt be able to take credit cards, and things would be just as tense as 9/11 but with a worse outcome.... just my opinion