Stop spying on, bullying and threatening other nations that disagree with you America!

Simple really.

Oh & end the counter-productive doomed occupations of Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan & impeach Bush the Mad for war crimes along with his neo-con puppet-masters while you’re at it!

The US have their latest rogue military scheme knocked out in a nice big bang.

The world as a whole is saved from yet another needless hazard created by the wasteful, polluting war-mongering US military-industrial complex.

Everyone’s happy!

(Well, except for all the patriotic scoundrels who’ll no doubt be flaming me as soon as this goes up… )

If you wanted to come up with a cover story for an ASAT test or demonstration, why would you chose the idea of a secret spy satellite, especially if you’re going to use the “excuse” of its toxic fuel load? Why not claim the target is something less intrinsically controversial? Do you think that the idea of the USA shooting down a new secret spy satellite able to image almost anywhere in the inhabited world is going to be better received than the idea of the USA shooting down a satellite in the first place?

First rule of cover-ups: never chose a cover story that makes you look worse than the truth would.

Although there is a hydrazine fuel cell, I believe it produces a waste that has to go somewhere. Not usually something you want floating around a telescope. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that military craft use fuel cells even though there’s plenty of free sunlight. They could use both — the military belt and suspenders approach.

I think the real reason is to prevent the satellite from falling into the wrong hands. It isn’t so much a question of being able to reverse engineer it to reproduce it. Instead someone could reverse engineering it to learn its capabilities and limitations. It’s amazing what can be deduced from what appears to be a pile of junk. A short list: communication frequencies, attitude stability, telescope imaging capabilities, even encryption methodology. It all depends on what survived the re-entry. If nothing else it could be used to confirm hypotheses about capabilities and indicate avenues for further “research.” I’m sure this is more of a concern than any possible biohazard.

These missions tend to use highly elliptical, retrograde, polar orbits to maximize time over target. As such, any debris would pretty much follow the same orbit. These orbits are used mostly be the military. Some civilian craft such as Landsat and weather observers share but the debris would be mostly a problem only to the military.

I worked in intelligence back in the 70s and my current job requires varying levels of clearance depending upon the project. The thing to keep in mind is that the military rarely divulges more than half truths.

I understand that those on board had quite a show though – two a minute for about half an hour or so. That must have been some display.

JC