China Blows Up a Satellite

It is no small feat to find a small satellite 500 miles out in orbit, passing overhead at 17,000 miles an hour, and destroy it with a rocket.  The Chinese apparently tried it at least three times before succeeding on Jan. 11. Kudos to Craig Covault of Aviation Week & Space Technology for breaking the story.  Some of what he wrote is HERE. GlobalSecurity.org, the group run by John Pike, a frequent space commentator, has some background material HERE. I talked to Covault, who said he’s a bit surprised at the amount of reaction from around the world.  He says China is far from having shown any consistent ability to conduct space warfare, if it ever comes to that. But Theresa Hitchens, who heads the Center for Defense Information, says "It does show a certain level of capability that I think was a bit of a surprise to most of us in the space community." She’s also concerned about the amount of debris the Chinese test created–300-800 pieces of junk that are at least baseball-sized (i.e., large enough for radar to track), and perhaps hundreds of thousands that are smaller. "We can’t see it, we can’t track it–and something as small as a marble can shatter a satellite."  Space scientists say this is a big deal; there have already been three known cases in the last 15 years when satellites were disabled by collisions with debris, and there’s no way to prevent more. NASA has a page that shows the paths of civilian satellites; it’s HERE.  Click on "J-Track 3D" on the left, if you care to download a Java applet, to see a popup of how busy they say orbital space is. (And if you get it to work, click on "Options," then speed it up to 1000x real-time.  Interesting to watch.) I’m curious how big an issue this is outside of east-coast policy circles.  Comments welcome.–Ned