U.S. Forms Secretive Team for Spy Satellite Destruction
“The impression arises that the United States is trying to use the accident with its satellite to test its national anti-missile defense system as a means of destroying satellites,” the Russian ministry said.
In order to give the United States more room to shoot down their malfunctioning spy satellite, a backup landing is being planned for the Atlantis space shuttle by the U.S. government. The backup runway will be activated February 20th at California’s Edwards Air Force Base, in addition to the primary site at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a landing at 9:06 a.m. EST, with a second window open at 10:40 a.m. EST.
According to Sally Davis, lead space station flight director for the shuttle flight, “We’re going to open up Dryden at the Edwards Air Force Base to ensure that we land at the earliest opportunity. The reason is to give the military the biggest possible window and maximum flexibility to ensure the success of the satellite intercept.
It has been announced by the U.S. Pentagon that it plans to fire a Standard Missile 3 from the U.S. Navy ship “Aegis” sometime after Atlantis lands, in order to destroy a U.S. reconnaissance satellite prior to it crashing on Earth. Weighing about 5,015 pounds, the classified National Reconnaissance Office satellite is the size of a bus, originally launched in December of 2006. A major malfunction has caused it to rapidly fall toward Earth.
Meanwhile, according to the United States military, they are concerned that 50% of the satellite’s mass will survive reentry. This includes a tank full of toxic hydrazine fuel, which could endanger the public in a populated area. Both windows–that of Atlantis’ landing and that of the spy satellite reentering orbit–will fall within days of each other. It is being considered that even before the landing of the Atlantis, secondary debris from the satellite could cause a fair amount of risk to the Atlantis, the International Space Station, and the people on Earth. At least that is what we are hearing from NASA and the DOD.
Mixed views are being considered on a global level regarding the shooting-down of the spy satellite. Unfortunately, the people of the United States are one of those groups–especially as the government had already gathered together a secretive group of “high-powered team” of officials and scientists. This meeting was held before the United States had informed the public that there was such a thing as a damaged U.S. spy satellite caring toxic fuel. It was also before the U.S. citizens, whose backbones pay all the bills of our government, realized that plans were to shoot down the toxic spy satellite. Personally, I wonder if they would have shot it down without informing anyone, if the news had not eventually been sent out to the public “watered down and filtered to tell anything but the actual truth”?
Russia has gone on record as saying that very same thing about the U.S. spy satellite fiasco. They feel it is part of an eventual space arms race, a “veiled weapons test” in order to move the arms race into space. Innocent Washington has denied it, by saying “they are only avoiding a damaging crash on Earth.” But Russia feels it is not as innocent as the U.S. is trying to present it, according to their ministry.
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 6:11 am and is filed under Mars News, Public Relations, Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
