Discovery News: Space Diary

What Goes Up ...

Of course, the Pentagon hadn’t planned on having the spy satellite launched 14 months ago coming down quite so early. The spacecraft, known as USA 193, shut down shortly after reaching orbit and has been drifting closer and closer toward a suicidal plunge through Earth’s atmosphere.

The military wants to hurry it along, concerned that its rather full load of toxic propellant could pose a hazard to populated areas on Earth should the satellite re-entry without human intervention to guide it to a resting place in the sea.

The plan to shoot the bird from its wobbly orbital perch has drawn a different kind of fire from critics who say it is a thinly disguised test in violation of anti-satellite weapons agreements. Ironically, one of the nay-sayers is China, which last year blasted apart a defunct weather satellite creating a minefield of debris for spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, including the International Space Station.

With the space shuttle set to land Wednesday morning, the U.S. Navy, which will carry out the operation, is expected to strike the satellite with a modified intercept missile launched from a cruiser in the Pacific as early as 10:30 p.m. EST Wednesday. (Thanks to amateur satellite watcher Ted Molczan, who runs Heavens-Above website and friends.)

NASA Comes of Age

The was something oddly comforting about the participation of NASA administrator Michael Griffin at the Pentagon briefing last week explaining the decision to shoot down a dead spy satellite from orbit.

The civilian space agency, the savior of a nation once terrified of a Soviet nuclear attack, has been floundering for decades, marked by two preventable space shuttle disasters and now mired in a risky and expensive undertaking to build a huge space station in orbit, a task many consider the most complicated engineering project ever attempted by humans.

While that in and of itself is a noble effort, the space station has never stoked public enthusiasm like the Apollo moon program. Maybe NASA was just ahead of its time.

Fifty years after the first forays beyond Earth’s atmosphere, with space well established as a staging ground for communications, reconnaissance and scientific research, NASA shared a dais with the deputy National Security advisor and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, lending its formidable and presumably impartial technical expertise to the unprecedented action the president wants to take to remove a spacecraft from orbit.

It is likely that millions of people who no longer follow the seemingly endless trials and tribulations of space station construction were suddenly aware that a space shuttle crew was in orbit. We were told the shuttle would land before the military strike to prevent the ship from flying through a cloud of wreckage as it re-entered the atmosphere that would result from the satellite’s destruction. We were told the strike would not endanger the space station, which orbits much higher than the planned target zone and which has astronauts and cosmonauts living in it full-time.

It is difficult to imagine Griffin’s immediate predecessors at this type of briefing, having neither the technical stature or political detachment to explain the nuances of rocket fuel toxicity or ballistic re-entry profiles.

Whether or not you believe the Pentagon’s rationale for removing the satellite -- to reduce the already miniscule chance of the satellite endangering populated areas -- or favor one of the alternative explanations -- a controversial and possibly illegal anti-satellite technology demonstration, or to prevent the spread of highly classified technology should intact parts of the satellite be salvageable -- NASA clearly had a seat at the grown-ups table.