Good catch, exactly why I love slashdot.. the original quote starts with:
"ON the morning of September 13, 1985, Air Force Major Doug Pearson smashed through the sound barrier in his F-15. Pointed almost directly upward more than seven miles above the Pacific Ocean, he tapped a little red button on the side of his control stick, and released a missile strapped to the belly of his plane. The missile blazed out of sight, leaving the earth's atmosphere quickly and reaching a speed of 13,000 miles per second. Pearson wondered if it would hit anything." http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/1245/
I did a quick google search and came up with a range of 15,000-24,000 mph for the ASM-135a ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT ), the modified missile they developed for anti-satellite operations. That's the right number but wrong unit so I double-checked the original source (National Review), and it is wrong in the original scanned copy and OCR text. I even checked the next couple of issues to see if they ever printed a correction but nothing came up.
There are plenty of good reasons to question the timing and urgency of the U.S. decision to destroy US 193, but the last thing they needed to do was prove to China they could shoot down a satellite. Both the U.S. and Russia proved this capability many times over until they were satisfied they had it down back in the Cold War with the U.S. even shooting down a satellite with an F-15 in 1985 [http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/1245/] (arguably a way cooler stunt than the sea-based shot).
The U.S. probably felt compelled to shoot it down because of its legal obligations under international space law to deal with potentially hazardous satellites (albeit a diminished risk and maybe not as urgent as they claimed). Its also very likely they were concerned that an intact satellite re-entering in an unfriendly region could compromise intelligence sources and methods. However, its not likely that they were doing this as a demonstration / warning shot to China or to test out new technology. They already have better methods for taking out a satellite if they wanted to and this shot was a one-time hack [http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3269].
Oberg had an earlier analysis (March 2008) on the same topic in The Space Review that covers many of the same points with a little more detail than this article.
The Washington Times and especially Bill Gertz are always good for a chuckle as I pass the newspaper box on my morning commute. You can't deny that he is a talented investigative reporter with unprecedented access to the defense and intelligence community but their agenda in selecting the intelligence to highlight is often amusingly transparent.
In this example, the new intelligence is that the debris from China's ASAT test is causing the U.S. to change the orbits of its satellites to avoid collisions. Thats all true and it can't be denied that the Chinese ASAT test caused an unprecedented amount of space debris. However, what Gertz chooses not to acknowledge is that these kinds of maneuvers have been going on for decades know, thanks to a legacy of space debris from U.S./Soviet space development and ASAT tests in the 70s-80s. Space debris was already becoming self-sustaining even before the Chinese test:
To be clear, China should more fully acknowledge its responsibility for the damage it has inflicted on the space environment. However, the way Gertz frames the article, the only reason we are having this problem is because of the test, as if China maliciously planned to create a lot of debris to tweak the U.S. (as many commenters here assume)..
Very plausible -- thats the first thing I thought of when I saw this story. NPR did a story on this a few months ago, about how movie marketers are working with scientists to time the release of their stories to coincide with movie releases:
Declan's article reminded me of an earlier study in another realm. Gerald Rosenberg, a law professor at the University of Chicago, did an exhaustive study of the ability of courts ("Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change?", 1991) to produce social reform and concluded that U.S. courts "can almost never be effective producers of significant social reform". (Good synopsis and book review here.)
He went further to argue that because the cost of participating in the court system was so expensive, "Public interest law groups that have long relied on litigation to achieve policy goals ought start looking elsewhere."
I agree with Declan but it would be interesting to see more statistics/studies to confirm this trend before we give up on this avenue for social change.
FIRST EVER POSITIVE PALERMO SCALE 'VIRTUAL IMPACTOR' ANNOUNCED - WITHOUT IAU REVIEW From Asteroid/Comet Connection, 23 July 2002 http://www.hohmanntransfer.com/news.htm
Excerpted from CCNET http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/cccmenu.html.
"It is interesting to note that NEODyS appear to have announced this first-ever positive Palermo Scale 'virtual impactor' without any formal IAU technical review. The IAU encourages such a review for any impact prediction that is at a level equal to or greater than zero on the Palermo Technical Scale (http://web.mit.edu/rpb/wgneo/TechComm.html)."
the last dozen or so 'close calls' have been retracted within a few days as the rest of the scientific community catches up.
hmm.. actually i think the astronomy.com article is the one with the poor writeup
In the Spacedaily article which actually quotes from the Science article, the study's principal author argues that his calculations apply to smaller asteroids that are within a decade of colliding with the earth:
"Spitale said the proposed technique would be useless for a large asteroid or an asteroid less than decades away from Earth. 'This technique will work best on objects the size of Golevka or smaller (300 meters, about 1,000 feet, or smaller). An object that size could do damage to the better part of a country. Even a 100-meter or 50-meter object can take out a good part of a city.'
Doesn't sound like thats at all useful against 1950 DA to me..
Re:Google Image search strikes again
on
Bert Is Evil
·
· Score: 1
I'm suddenly tempted to flood google's image archive with as many doctored images of bin Laden as I can:p Bin laden wearing a dress, bin Laden in a mall, bin Laden shaking hands with Bush, etc.
Why is it that whenever the green-left tries to embrace capitalist principles, they always end up proposing the same kind of heavy-handed top-down regulation that is the anti-thesis of a market economy?
A better book on enviro-capitalism is Peter Huber's criminally overlooked book 'Hard Green'. Or better yet, read Fredrich Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom' for the classic defense of local, market-based knowledge over top-down national regulation...
I poured over the faq and the contest information already. Anybody see anything that says I can't target a robot at the site to save my oh so valuable page-viewing time?
Slashdot Mirror
Good catch, exactly why I love slashdot.. the original quote starts with:
"ON the morning of September 13, 1985, Air Force Major Doug Pearson smashed through the sound barrier in his F-15. Pointed almost directly upward more than seven miles above the Pacific Ocean, he tapped a little red button on the side of his control stick, and released a missile strapped to the belly of his plane. The missile blazed out of sight, leaving the earth's atmosphere quickly and reaching a speed of 13,000 miles per second. Pearson wondered if it would hit anything."
http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/1245/
I did a quick google search and came up with a range of 15,000-24,000 mph for the ASM-135a ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT ), the modified missile they developed for anti-satellite operations. That's the right number but wrong unit so I double-checked the original source (National Review), and it is wrong in the original scanned copy and OCR text. I even checked the next couple of issues to see if they ever printed a correction but nothing came up.
There are plenty of good reasons to question the timing and urgency of the U.S. decision to destroy US 193, but the last thing they needed to do was prove to China they could shoot down a satellite. Both the U.S. and Russia proved this capability many times over until they were satisfied they had it down back in the Cold War with the U.S. even shooting down a satellite with an F-15 in 1985 [http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/1245/] (arguably a way cooler stunt than the sea-based shot).
The U.S. probably felt compelled to shoot it down because of its legal obligations under international space law to deal with potentially hazardous satellites (albeit a diminished risk and maybe not as urgent as they claimed). Its also very likely they were concerned that an intact satellite re-entering in an unfriendly region could compromise intelligence sources and methods. However, its not likely that they were doing this as a demonstration / warning shot to China or to test out new technology. They already have better methods for taking out a satellite if they wanted to and this shot was a one-time hack [http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3269].
Oberg had an earlier analysis (March 2008) on the same topic in The Space Review that covers many of the same points with a little more detail than this article.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1073/1
The Washington Times and especially Bill Gertz are always good for a chuckle as I pass the newspaper box on my morning commute. You can't deny that he is a talented investigative reporter with unprecedented access to the defense and intelligence community but their agenda in selecting the intelligence to highlight is often amusingly transparent.
In this example, the new intelligence is that the debris from China's ASAT test is causing the U.S. to change the orbits of its satellites to avoid collisions. Thats all true and it can't be denied that the Chinese ASAT test caused an unprecedented amount of space debris. However, what Gertz chooses not to acknowledge is that these kinds of maneuvers have been going on for decades know, thanks to a legacy of space debris from U.S./Soviet space development and ASAT tests in the 70s-80s. Space debris was already becoming self-sustaining even before the Chinese test:
http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3127
To be clear, China should more fully acknowledge its responsibility for the damage it has inflicted on the space environment. However, the way Gertz frames the article, the only reason we are having this problem is because of the test, as if China maliciously planned to create a lot of debris to tweak the U.S. (as many commenters here assume)..
Very plausible -- thats the first thing I thought of when I saw this story. NPR did a story on this a few months ago, about how movie marketers are working with scientists to time the release of their stories to coincide with movie releases:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
For example, they made sure that for each of the three jurassic park movies, there was a major dinosaur discovery in the news a few weeks before.
Declan's article reminded me of an earlier study in another realm. Gerald Rosenberg, a law professor at the University of Chicago, did an exhaustive study of the ability of courts ("Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change?", 1991) to produce social reform and concluded that U.S. courts "can almost never be effective producers of significant social reform". (Good synopsis and book review here.)
He went further to argue that because the cost of participating in the court system was so expensive, "Public interest law groups that have long relied on litigation to achieve policy goals ought start looking elsewhere."
I agree with Declan but it would be interesting to see more statistics/studies to confirm this trend before we give up on this avenue for social change.
still under review:
.
FIRST EVER POSITIVE PALERMO SCALE 'VIRTUAL IMPACTOR' ANNOUNCED - WITHOUT IAU REVIEW From Asteroid/Comet Connection, 23 July 2002 http://www.hohmanntransfer.com/news.htm
Excerpted from CCNET
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/cccmenu.html
"It is interesting to note that NEODyS appear to have announced this first-ever positive Palermo Scale 'virtual impactor' without any formal IAU technical review. The IAU encourages such a review for any impact prediction that is at a level equal to or greater than zero on the Palermo Technical Scale (http://web.mit.edu/rpb/wgneo/TechComm.html)."
the last dozen or so 'close calls' have been retracted within a few days as the rest of the scientific community catches up.
hmm.. actually i think the astronomy.com article is the one with the poor writeup
In the Spacedaily article which actually quotes from the Science article, the study's principal author argues that his calculations apply to smaller asteroids that are within a decade of colliding with the earth:
"Spitale said the proposed technique would be useless for a large asteroid or an asteroid less than decades away from Earth.
'This technique will work best on objects the size of Golevka or smaller (300 meters, about 1,000 feet, or smaller). An object that size could do damage to the better part of a country. Even a 100-meter or 50-meter object can take out a good part of a city.'
Doesn't sound like thats at all useful against 1950 DA to me..
I'm suddenly tempted to flood google's image archive with as many doctored images of bin Laden as I can :p Bin laden wearing a dress, bin Laden in a mall, bin Laden shaking hands with Bush, etc.
Culture-jamming as information warfare..
Why is it that whenever the green-left tries to embrace capitalist principles, they always end up proposing the same kind of heavy-handed top-down regulation that is the anti-thesis of a market economy?
A better book on enviro-capitalism is Peter Huber's criminally overlooked book 'Hard Green'. Or better yet, read Fredrich Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom' for the classic defense of local, market-based knowledge over top-down national regulation...
www.earthinthebalance.org
I poured over the faq and the contest
information already. Anybody see anything
that says I can't target a robot at the
site to save my oh so valuable page-viewing time?
8}