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20-Year-Old Military Weather Satellite Explodes In Orbit
schwit1 writes A 20-year-old U.S. military weather satellite apparently exploded for no obvious reason. The incident has put several dozen pieces of space junk into orbit. From the article: "A 20-year-old military weather satellite apparently exploded in orbit Feb. 3 following what the U.S. Air Force described as a sudden temperature spike. The “catastrophic event” produced 43 pieces of space debris, according to Air Force Space Command, which disclosed the loss of the satellite Feb. 27 in response to questions from SpaceNews. The satellite, Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 13, was the oldest continuously operational satellite in the DMSP weather constellation."
What no obvious reason? Either the batteries overheated and exploded (fuel and oxidizer packed close together and sitting for 20 years) or the fuel tank vapors exploded on their own (tends to happen with monopropellant--no need to additional oxidizers, just a random injection of energy). Russian rocket bodies used to explode in orbit from time to time from fuel vapors (undesired bipropellant mixing) until they were convinced to burn off all their spare fuel after they deployed their payload into its orbit.
The Russian politician was far from obscure, well known and very vocal as a matter of fact. He was also against Putin and Putin's nut job attempts at bringing back the Cold War. He was someone we like, not someone we'd want to kill.
Your conspiracy theory only makes sense if you know absolutely nothing at all about what's actually going on.
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Obligatory XKCD.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
"A 1um laser fired out of a 1m aperture spreads to an 800m circle at an altitude of 800km"
You're off by a factor 1000. The divergence is about 1e-6 rad, which makes 0.8 m diameter at 800 km.
Now another issue is that satellites tend to be wrapped in gold-coated foil, which will reflect 99% of the light at 1 micrometer. It would be difficult to overheat the body of the satellite, although the solar panels might be damaged more easily.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
That Russian politician was part of the Yeltsin administration that Putin had promised immunity to when he took control. This killing is very scary politically for what it means.
We may have just lost Space:
"The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect,[1][2] collisional cascading or ablation cascade), proposed by the NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade—each collision generating space debris which increases the likelihood of further collisions.[3] One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space exploration, and even the use of satellites, unfeasible for many generations.[3]"
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