How It Went Down

Hell. SciAm is poo-pooing it this month with an article decrying Space War. I noticed this month that two of their articles (including this one0 are written by activists in the field. Seems fishy to me.

You mean "B2" Garwin? The guy who claimed that the B2 couldn't fly?

The fact that SciAm has become just another mouthpiece of the Democratic party is a betrayal of organized science in general. How serious would you take a science magazine that had been taken over by Evangelical Christians and was pushing creationism? SciAm's "political science" is no different.

It sure didn't look like a lot of people attended the Pentagon briefing from the video. Hard to tell, since it never showed the entire room, though.

I sure hope more attended than the handful visible clustered together at the front.

Wow, that gizmodo link sure has a lot of comments from the retardo-american community.

Congratulations to all the members of the military and civilians involved in this accomplishment. I feel some slight connection, since my late father worked on contracts for the Aegis system, years ago.

Congratulations to the US! Nice hit ^_^

Of course this success will only increase the whining of most "reality"-based idiotarians but one or two of them might wake up.

As for SciAm somewhere in the nineties they became the new NewScientist and the NewScientist became a toilet rag with "science" gloss. Both can be safely ignored.

Check out this video of a speech by Dr. Carol Rosin, one of the leading anti-space weapons "experts."

http://youtube.com/watch?v=z-nheW7faMY

Von Braun told her that the US government knows about multiple alien civilizations???

Yet, she is taken seriously in Washington and even invited to testify before Congress.

I think I missed her logic somewhere, though. Leaving aside the (slight!) lack of evidence for her claims, what if they were true? If the military knew about about hostile aliens, wouldn't developing space weapons be a good thing? Isn't that what we would want the military to do?

By the way, Dr. Rosin's PhD is honorary, from Nigeria, and in the "Humanities." Shades of Mark Whittington. :-)

SciAm isn't much better than Discover magazine anymore, it's gone incredibly down hill.

I believe the real reasons for the shoot-down are three-fold. First, the satellite is large with some substantially sized solid pieces (namely, a very large mirror) which means very large pieces would survive reentry all the way to the ground, which would pose an impact risk to humans and would represent a violation of current treaty, I believe. Naturally, because of the top secret nature of the satellite, revealing this information (especially the size of the mirror) is out of the question, so the mere existence of this reason would never be publicly mentioned. Second, the vehicle contains top-secret electronics and equipment which would be more likely to survive reentry if the vehicle reentered in one piece. Third, this serves as a chance to demonstrate the operational ability of our anti-satellite / anti-ballistic missile system. Also, the Hydrazine issue seems like it could be a real concern, but compared to the other issues it seems comparatively minor.

They're complaining about the quality of the video footage of a missile intercept at over a hundred miles' altitude?

Here is an article by a "Space & Defense Research Analyst"

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/library/news/2008/space-080220-satellite-shootdown.htm

He fails to grasp the difference between the USA 193 ASAT test at low altitude with very very low probabilities of long lived space debris and the China ASAT test with 100% probability of very long lived debris. The incompetence of so called experts amazes me.

You mean "B2" Garwin? The guy who claimed that the B2 couldn't fly?

Care to back this statement up?

I didn't think so.