Why is there so much fuss about shooting down L-21, the dead spy satellite?
We’ve been putting men on the moon for almost 40 years (until we stopped, anyway). We’re landing all kinds of smart gadgets on Mars. We can hit an asteroid from 80,000,000 miles away. So what’s the BFD with hitting a school bus-sized derelict hunk of space trash from 150 miles away? Give Dick Cheney a .410, point him at a dove, and wait for the hydrazine shower.
I mean, it’s not like we don’t understand orbital mechanics. It’s not that we don’t understand missle targeting-after all, we’ve been targeting the Russians, and specific missle silos, with great accuracy for half a century, and that’s going through the atmosphere twice (up and down), whereas here we’re just going up. What about all the money we’ve spent on SDI, otherwise known as “Star Wars”? Didn’t we get anything back from that investment? And I really find it hard to believe that the U.S. military hasn’t been running simulations for this exact exercise for decades.
No, this isn’t a trivial exercise. Among other things, the closing speed of 20,000 MPH requires dead-on aim: a fraction of a degree off target means the SM-3 missle “warhead” will miss the L-21 by miles. But a dual-core Itanium processor has 2,000,000,000 (yes, billion) transistors. If we can manufacture with that level of precision, we can certainly guide a warhead into a narrow target window.
A long time ago, I had an alter ego known as ”Mr. Evil” (there’s a small story that I’m not going to share). I sympathize with my homie Austin Powers-inspired character Dr. Evil, who groused, “You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!”
If the sharks with laser beams can’t shoot the damn thing down, we’ll send the fembots after it.
