Hattix

Under the guise of destroying a potentially hazardous satellite, the United States successfully tested an anti-satellite missile west of Hawaii early this morning. While the official line from the White House was that the ailing spy satellite, USA 193, was a public hazard, few doubt that the test was in response to a similar Chinese test in 2007 which the US publically condemned.

The satellite never achieved functionality and so could not maintain orbit, it was due to re-enter uncontrolled in March, where it potentially could have caused damage. This is nothing new, spent rocket casings and old satellites re-enter twenty or more times a year, so why were the US so interested in this one? The official public line is that the hydrazine in the satellite’s fuel tanks was a danger to public health and indeed this is true, but satellites with hydrazine have come down before (one a year or so) and there’s been no missile shooting at them, the overwhelming odds are that the satellite with ditch harmlessly in an ocean, usually the Pacific. Being so volatile, the hydrazine escapes harmlessly into the atmosphere in just a few hours. You don’t want to be breathing it, but it doesn’t persist very long in the environment anyway.

Word on the street is that USA 193 wasn’t your ordinary Hubble Space Telescope pointed down (indeed, most spy satellites are quite similar to HST in construction, just far more advanced and much more expensive), instead a testbed for new technologies. It’d be quite embarrassing for the US were such a satellite to re-enter over China or Russia, allowing them to access its programming (was it really going to peek on Russian military secrets?) and technology. The risk to public health was acceptable, this thing has happened before, but the risk in giving away spy technology secrets to rival nations was not acceptable.

Pretending to care about public well-being is just easier for the politicians to say.