Satellite of Love
It’s been a long time since space and military tech has felt really “cool” to me, but the recent Navy shoot-down of the broken spy satellite has somehow reawakened that old childish sense of awe. Come on! They hit a small target moving at insane speeds (some news stories had numbers like 20,000mph) over 100 miles up with a metal tube propelled by a controlled explosion. That alone is pretty awesome math - but then add in the complexity of moving through that much atmosphere, changes in air pressures, winds, launching from a floating ship, the short notice, the pressure of the whole world waiting to see if the US still has it or not - and oh yeah - the rocket system they used wasn’t even designed for this to begin with! Mad props to the US Navy department of Blowing-Shit-Up!
IMO, we need more of this kind of stuff. These kinds of technical feats are inspiring in ways that seeing the lately AJAX-powered website with pictures of Brittany Spears will never be. Stuff like this is what being American used to be all about - kicking ass, showing off a bit, and moving on to the next challenge. Whatever happened to that spirit?
February 24th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Yeah, I appreciated the difficulty of the feat, too. Nice to know we can do that at will, too. Just I’m case NKorea tries launching something we don’t feel that hot about. I guess China tried an orbital detonation and left all kinds of debris, thereby rendering that particular orbit useless. They don’t seem too concerned about pollution on Earth or anywhere else.