The Sky is Falling

2-20-08 The Sky is Falling… The Navy is going to shoot down a satellite. The cover story is that it never worked right and it may expose people on the ground to dangerous fuel. This is a lame cover story. There is no way that a volatile fuel such as hydrazine would ever survive re-entry.

The assumption is that it is a weapons test. This is probably true in part. What they don’t want to talk about is that there is almost certainly a thermopile on board this satellite. This is usually a 55 gallon drum sized plutonium pile that produces about 20 Kilowatts for 20 years. These things would absolutely survive re-entry. The thing is mostly shielding. It must be busted into pieces to make it burn up upon re-entry. It is also important that it land in a deep part of the ocean.

One often neglected historic note is that when Apollo 13 limped back from the moon it had one of these thermopiles on the LEM. The thermopile was supposed to have been left on the moon to power an experiment but since they didn’t land, it came home with them. The solution was that they targeted the Marianas trench with the LEM after it had served it purpose as a lifeboat and power supply. Plus, the LEM was coming in at trans-Lunar velocities, about thirty thousand MPH not the eighteen thousand of an orbiting satellite. It would have been a much hotter fire upon re-entry.

The current wounded satellite does not have maneuvering control or they could have done a remote controlled re-entry which is usually done without fanfare. The other point that is often overlooked is that much of the public activity is just cover story for other more secret military programs. It is said that half the cost of any military program is spent to keep it secret. In my opinion, the entire missile defense system or ‘missile shield’ is an elaborate ruse to cover the real Buck Rodgers systems. The system in question is the Airborne Laser. There is no doubt that we have these systems in service. There is only a question about how many there are and how potent they might be.

Now it is about two years since North Korea launched some missile tests around the Fourth of July. The news story was that the missiles failed as missiles are want to do. They all blew-up and crashed. It turns out that they did all crash but not until they had achieved an altitude of 60 miles and entered into international airspace (about 100 miles off shore). These were clearly shoot downs by the airborne laser system. They were also clearly warnings that anything you can launch we can and will shoot down.

All the military powers in the world know of our Airborne Laser system. Why is it still a secret? Well, there is the balance of terror to maintain. Plus, we don’t want to acknowledge that we can shoot an aircraft down from 1,200 miles away. It tends to make the traveling public jumpy.

I for one am glad that there are dedicated Americans working to keep us ahead of the rest of the world in offensive and defensive weapons. The real point of the Airborne Laser is to keep some nut job terrorist from launching a nuke over the east coast of this country and EMP’ing our butts back to the 1800’s. If they need to shoot down a satellite with clearly anachronistic weapons to maintain a fiction, God Speed.