Robotic Satellite's First Military Mission?

Posted 4 Mar 2009 at 16:19 UTC by Rog-a-matic

When the article hit in February describing the collision of Russian and US space satellites, I was both surprised and suspicious. The satellites shared a popular near-Earth orbit at around 500 miles, but still, it's like having two grains of sand meet in a football stadium. Not impossible, but very unlikely, especially since these multi-million-dollar satellites are tracked by several Earth-based stations. The position of nearly 1000 satellites are monitored along with thousands of tiny items - some as small as 5cm. Now, a Russian General is saying the collision might have been a military test to prove if a robotic satellite could be capable of disabling or destroying an enemy satellite. Whether any of this is true or not remains to be seen, but I don't think we've heard the end of this story.

Fishy, posted 5 Mar 2009 at 14:23 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

Yep, the whole story sure sounded fishy to me from the beginning.

So are the Russians accusing the US, or, are the Russians admitting they did something? First we have China blowing up a sat and creating massive amounts of debris and now this with even more debris.

We need to create a sat with a bunch of nails and BBs in it and explode it in orbit like the true space terrorists we are. There would be billions of ultra tiny bullet sized moons in orbit ready to pounce on anything that wants to try to enter space. Basically we could take out every sat in orbit and then no country will have to worry about spy or military sats anymore. We wouldn't have to worry much about our phones ringing off the hook either! No need to hear that lame computer female gps voice on trips! For that matter, good bye UFO's too! Maybe not. ;-) It would kill many birds with one stone! Wouldn't that be so cool? Luddites will rule! Naw, let's taze the Luddites! ;-)