The Navy put on an amazing demonstration of hyper-ballistic marksmanship when one of its SM-3
missiles neatly pierced
NROL-21 (also known as USA 193), one of our ailing spy satellites, a day or so before its decaying orbit brought its remains home to Earth. Reminiscent of the hubbub surrounding the last days of
Skylab before it made its fiery re-entry in the fall of 1979, the media and the
blogosphere have been abuzz with the
images and small scraps of information doled out to us by the military. As a veteran of the aerospace community, I found the whole affair fascinating, but it raised several questions whose answers might be even more interesting than the shoot-down itself.
First of all, why did we decide to spike the satellite in the first place? Certainly it carried 1000+ lb of toxic hydrazine propellant, but the tank it was in would have to both survive an incendiary re-entry and then strike a piece of inhabited area before it had any chance of harming someone within the estimated 20 - 30 m that it would pose an actual threat. I’d also speculate that if the Navy could calculate the satellite orbit closely enough to hit it, they had a fairly good idea of where it was going to land (or, more likely, splash) but no mention of a high probability of terrestrial impact was given in any of the official press releases I’ve seen.
One could also wonder about why we decided to create a huge cloud of space debris that will make lower orbital space quite hazardous to transit for some period of time. Although this satellite’s low, decaying orbit ensures that most of its pieces will enter the atmosphere in relatively short order, I’d wonder how anyone can guarantee that a few random chunks won’t pick up enough of the 130 megajoules worth of kinetic energy the warhead delivers in a fashion that will re-boost them into a higher, more long-lived, and more dangerous orbit?
Such fuss over a relatively low-level threat and a willingness to risk polluting low-Earth orbits with more high-speed space trash seems to hint that there may be some other reason for the elaborate shoot-down which our government officials would prefer to not discuss. The most obvious possibility is that somebody had a strong desire to prevent an inadvertent technology transfer in case large enough pieces of USA 193 manage to land on the wrong patch of the globe. Other long-time observers have speculated that the Navy used this as an opportunity to test their missile interception capabilities on a real-world target (although the Navy firmly denies it). I leave it to those more imaginative than myself to come up with other, more Byzantine, explanations.
As interesting as these questions are, the thing that really puzzles me is why we know so much about this operation in the first place. Given our military and security organizations’ regular practice of denying even the most mildly sensitive activities, it’s rather curious how seemingly open they are about this rather futuristic exercise. Granted, USA 193’s orbit has been closely tracked by several groups of amateur civilian space-watchers, so any disturbance in its predicted decay would be no secret, but such things have not prevented our government from pretending that many other hidden-in-plain-sight activities did not exist. A couple of examples whose revelation should not land me in indefinite detention are the
Aurora hypersonic plane and the less-reliably documented
Black Star space plane projects.
One explanation about why the Navy has been so uncharacteristically forthcoming about the USA 193 exercise is that it is either not what it appears to be, or that it provides a distraction which keeps us from noticing something else that’s going on. After reading
Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites (Smithsonian Press ISBN-10: 1560988304) which shows how widely-publicized civilian space programs like Vanguard and
Biosat were mostly devised as a cover for the CORONA reconnaissance satellite program...well, once you see how it’s been done before, it’s not too hard to imagine that the public spectacle of blowing up a disabled satellite might have been concocted to provide convenient cover or distraction for some other program or activity. My lack of expertise in this area (as well as a strong aversion to being whisked away to some secluded, extremely quiet place) prevents me from speculating too deeply about this, but I’d welcome your thoughts on the matter.
Comments? Questions? Speculations on what’s really behind the USA 193 shoot-down? Write me at
lhg at en-genius dot net, or post your comments on our blog.
