Deterrence and P.R.

From CNN: "The U.S. military may try within days to shoot down a failed satellite using a missile launched from a Navy ship, officials announced Thursday":

"While much space trash and debris have safely crashed to Earth after burning up in the atmosphere on re-entry, authorities said what makes this 5,000-pound satellite different is the approximately 1,000 pounds of frozen toxic hydrazine propellant it carries."

Oye, where to start with this one? Essentially, the military is temporarily overstating the risk this satellite poses just long enough to try to destroy it with a missile, not because it's actually dangerous, but because there's a P.R. opportunity for missile defense.

Hydrazine, despite the scary name, is just hydrogen peroxide. While you probably don't want a lungfull of the stuff, we're talking about a thousand pounds that will first be incinerated by atmospheric re-entry, then, if any survives, spread and diluted by the atmosphere. Wherever you're reading this from, I guarantee there's a factory, refinery, or plant nearby dumping far worse things into the atmosphere, according to EPA regulations. Hydrazine has been used as rocket fuel since world war 2, so plenty of it has already been dumped into the atmosphere.

My favorite part:

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said there's nothing the military can do to make the outcome worse. "If we miss, nothing changes. If we shoot and barely touch it, the satellite is just barely in orbit" and would still burn up somewhat in the atmosphere, Griffin said. "If we shoot and get a direct hit, that's a clean kill and we're in good shape," he added.

Here's what happens next: either the military is able to hit and destroy the satellite seconds before it hits the atmosphere, and it becomes a big story. A reminder that despite having trouble with the low-tech stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military's still got us covered with the high-tech stuff. Or, they miss and the satellite burns up, with maybe a few chunks hitting the ocean.
In this case, the story is "we're safe, all went according to plan, and missile defense technology wasn't really designed for this kind of thing anyway". I think it's 50/50 which way it'll go.

What's conspicuously missing from the current story is that the military knows exactly where and when this satellite is coming down. They're tracking it with radar, and before they could begin putting the assets in place to attempt to shoot it down, they'd have to know exactly where it was going to be, and consequently, where it would end up. If you recall, the original story was all about how they had no idea where or when it would come down. I explained in my last entry that this didn't necessarily mean it was a threat. Somewhere between then and now, they ran the math and didn't tell anyone. Lame.

One other super-relevent piece of this story: in the first test of this technology by any country since the 1980s, China destroyed a weather satellite with a missile last year. So that's been hanging over us.

I can't wait to see what happens.