News broke yesterday that the Pentagon (DOD) and NASA have decided to shoot down a crippled National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite instead of letting it burn up on reentry as originally planned. Just last week, the Pentagon was saying that the odds of a sizable chunk of the spy satellite surviving reentry and hitting land, much less a populated area, were very low. However, NASA and the DOD have reconsidered that assessment. They are now saying they do not want to risk the possibility that some, or all, of the volatile hydrazine fuel in the satellite could survive reentry and pose a danger if it were to impact in a populated area. So to preclude this new scenario, as remote as it may be, the DOD intends to destroy the satellite in space. The plan is to fire a modified Standard Missile 3 from a Navy ship at sea, and hope they score a direct hit on the satellite before it starts to reenter the earth's atmosphere. The theory being that a bunch of very small satellite pieces resulting from the missile strike are more likely to burn up on reentry than a few bigger chunks of the satellite, including frozen hydrazine, that may survive an uncontrolled reentry.

This change of Pentagon policy regarding the wayward NRO satellite has raised some interesting questions. Is it possible that DOD is now worried that their reconnaissance satellite has such secret technology on board that the they don't want to take a chance, even remote, that a piece of it may survive reentry and wind up on eBay, available to the highest bidder, including folks not friendly to the U.S.? Is this just a good excuse to test our own capability for shooting down a satellite? Since the 1980s, a moratorium on testing anti-satellite technology (ASAT) in space has been put in place by congress.  China was criticized for just this same thing last year when they used a missile to destroy one of their old Chinese meteorological satellites in low earth orbit. Not only were folks upset with the Chinese display of space militarization, the resulting explosion of the satellite scattered thousands of pieces of debris into low earth orbit, where some of the larger pieces could pose a possible threat to other satellites, launch vehicles, or even the space station.  Should we also be concerned that destroying the NRO satellite could produce similar orbital debris hazards?  It looks like the NRO satellite smackdown is scheduled sometime within the next four weeks, and it will be interesting to see if their is any potential "fallout" (pun intended) from the U.S. policy of pro-actively destroying a satellite in space. Inquiring minds want to know, so stay tuned.

Though some sources are saying this is the first time the U.S. has ever fired a missile at a satellite, this is not true. In 1985 the U.S. Air Force destroyed a satellite in orbit by launching a small missile from an F-15 flying at high altitude. Like the controversial Chinese test last year, the Air Force test in 1985 produced hundreds of pieces of orbital debris, some of which stayed in orbit for over 20 years.