Navy Ducks Sat Shootdown Redo
The U.S. Navy marshaled its resources quickly to shoot down a broken satellite recently, but there are no plans to stay ready for a repeat performance, a senior Navy official said Wednesday.
When the U.S. government decided that the falling spy satellite posed a risk, missile defense officials assembled a takedown plan within weeks. It worked -- last month, the Pentagon smacked the satellite out of the sky and demolished the bird's hydrazine fuel tank, which the military officials said could have survived re-entry and spilled its poisonous cargo.
Despite this success, the Missile Defense Agency ducked when asked whether it could spring into action faster for a repeat performance. It would depend on too many technical specifics to say, said Rear Adm. Alan "Brad" Hicks, Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense program manager, at a Navy League press conference.
He said there's no further work on the concept because last month's shootdown was a one-time event, so there's no active requirement for the technology to work against satellites on an ongoing basis.
"It is not a core mission. It is not a capability out there for us to use," Hicks said.
The U.S. Navy's satellite shootdown cost around $90 million, he said. That's not including additional costs for sensors, engineers and other support that isn't factored into the initial ballpark estimate.
-- Rebecca Christie
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have a look at:
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3ac0a7d1cf-700c-4054-acb2-e44de336e7ec
Specifically the part:
“We didn’t predict an explosion,” says RADM Brad Hicks, U.S. Navy manager of the Aegis air and space defense program. “But the hydrazine tank did burn for tens of seconds."
Firstly, this means that important details of the physical chemistry of hydrazine were missing from the NASA/NRO/DoD models, and that raises questions whether we ought to trust the re-entry modeling that predicted that the hydrazine would not have exploded/deflagrated if US-193 re-entered of its own accord. Most likely, the hydrazine fuel would have auto-ignited and since the decomposition reactions are highly exothermic this would have propagated throughout the mixed-phase hydrazine in the tank and consumed all the hydrazine in a thermal runaway or deflagration.
Secondly, that the tank burned for "tens of seconds" raises a big question-mark over the assertion that the SM-3 kill vehicle really hit the "bulls-eye" of the fuel tank. If it really did that, then the frozen hydrazine ice ball would quickly be dispersed (while also being possibly ignited), but a tens of seconds "burning" [really decomposition] would not be expected.
Thus, all the public information to date on the interception would appear to indicate that:
1. the Raytheon KV did not hit the bulls-eye, and
2. further, that the hydrazine would have in any case burnt up if US-193 had been allowed to re-enter of its own accord.
Posted by: yousaf at March 23, 2008 06:27 PM