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North Korea Missile Launch Fails
An anonymous reader writes "Remember the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile launch by the North Koreans last night? You know, the one that went over Japan and supposedly put a 'communications satellite' into orbit. Well, according to the US Northern Command and NORAD it has been a complete and utter failure, with the second stage and payload 'falling in the Pacific.'"
Or... better yet. We could salvage the bottom of cereal boxes for the secret decoder rings.
Even if they are cheap plastic toys made to amuse 4 year olds, they are certainly more advanced than anything North Korea has.
taking north korea out does more damage than letting it continue existing
a kidnapper holding a gun to a hostage's head counts on the same logic
which is what seoul is: the hostage that lets the sleazbags to the north continue to draw breath
the regime in pyongyang has 0% legitimacy. the onyl reason it exists is due to the number of guns it has pointed at everyone else. not like it even cares about its own people or good relations with any of its neighbors
its just the rabid dog on china's leash to give south korea, japan, and the usa indigestion
if china ever became convinced the regime in pyongyang no longer served any geopolitical purpose, it would disappear overnight
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What part of this don't you understand?
The 460th Space Wing, with headquarters at Buckley Air Force Base, Colo., has units that operate DSP satellites and report warning information, via communications links, to the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Strategic Command early warning centers within Cheyenne Mountain, located near Colorado Springs, Colorado. These centers immediately forward data to various agencies and areas of operations around the world. Air Force Space Command's SBIRS Wing [2] at the Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles AFB, California, is responsible for development and acquisition of the satellites.
units = people. People sit there and monitor terminals looking at blips and determining if they are launches by following procedures. They then get on "communications links", aka "phones" and call NORAD. It's all done manually. War Games was science fiction, not just then, but also now.
If I built a rocket ship and blasted myself into space (ala The Astronaut Farmer), none of these people would even notice. More likely someone would see a blip on a radar monitoring station and report that to NORAD.. again, via a telephone, and NORAD would write it off as an operator error. Maybe a few months later a satellite monitoring system would spot me in orbit, if I maintained one for that long, but that information would only be delivered to NORAD as part of a space debris avoidance report.. and most like amateur astronomers would spot it first.
There's no Michael Bay movie style realtime monitoring of satellites and missile launches. Those big screens in the war room are updated by technicians entering data into terminals, by hand. This isn't to say that it could not be done. It could be. But it would require a lot more hardware and the continual updating of that hardware, and that's the kind of thing the private sector does, and only if there's actual customers who will take their money elsewhere if the systems stop working. Governments continue to reward contractors for failing to do their jobs, so any system like this would likely become outdated in a few years (as in, unable to keep up with changing conditions) and, although that is exactly the situation we have now, that is considered too much of a risk.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Seriously, when are we going to stop believing our governments' attempts to keep us scared of one bogey man after another?
When there are actually no boogeymen left?
Can you honestly say that Kim Jong is not a threat?
If he had a magic button right now that would nuke the US, do you think he'd even hesitate before pressing it?
There's no place like
I guess you have obtained all this information from the same people that informed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? I see no reason to trust any information provided by the US
Also: Killing Canadian troops.
Yeah, well if the Canadians could have bothered to change the batteries correctly on their GPS-based targeting device they wouldn't have called JDAMs on their own heads.