Did The US Government Kill A Russian Weather Satellite?

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It seems like there has been alot of satellites getting blow up lately to me I wonder if we are in a secret space war with other countries namely China and Russia???

reply to post by Sentinel 1

Its a case of another drunken idiot in a big hat russian officer shooting off his mouth, with out having any idea what he's talking about.
Why the hell would we shoot up a rinky dinky satellite, its purpose is to study space radiation, come on.
If we were actively testing there are plenty of things in orbit to shoot at that nobody would miss.

Could it be that it just broke all by itself, like satellites do. Its not like there havent been any failures in the russian space program.



Is what I think

A question of timing
The Russian space experts' speculation was based on the timing of the satellite's failure: They claimed that the satellite stopped functioning on March 7 and said the United States was conducting a military experiment at about the same time.

"According to some Russian experts, chances are high that the satellite fell victim to U.S. experiments in ray influence on spacecraft," Novosti reported.

"One of such experiments, according to official information, was held in the U.S. shortly before our satellite stopped sending signals," the source was quoted as saying, without elaboration.

The source described how Universitetsky-Tatyana stopped sending signals suddenly: "Stable communication with the satellite was maintained until it left the sector of Russian ground-based assets' radio visibility,” Novosti quoted the source as saying. “When it made a spin and returned to our zone about an hour later, its onboard equipment was already dead."

Interesting, using a ground based laser to fry a Russian non-military satellite to show them that we can certainly goes well with earlier announcing by Bush that America claims entire Earths orbit as US territory and will protect it by military means in order to establish favorable conditions for private American interests in space.

ubt it is anything that could be acturately called a 'space war,' but testing secret weapons on possible opponents is certainly a very possible and very useful endeavor. I think we probably did take down the satellite and that actions like these will continue. The Chinese do have an anti-satellite missle, and the first targets would be GPS.

I dont know about all this spacewars stuff and killing sattelites being to bad and all....Anyway I was talking with some friends and we pretty much came to the conclussion that they are mostly for convenience I mean if ya think about it we went along time with out them and did fine...Our military still teaches morris code for instance..The finance dept has an unending paper trail..And if all else fails I am sure we still have a few rotary phones laying around....If nothing else the govt. would lose power over the people...Or atleast it would make things a bit slower anyhow...

All in all I dont think it would be as bad as we think it would be.....

Reading the article, it doesn't sound like the satellite was 'blown up'. It sounds like it simply failed.

I'm rather suspicious of any reported story that can't cite a better source than "some Russian experts". Experts in what field? How 'expert'? After all, I can find 'some American experts' who will tell you that Elvis is alive and well, and singing Karaoke in the Bahamas. Of course, I won't mention that they're expert tabloid writers

Something else that bothers me here is the choice of targets. If we were just testing an ASAT system, why not use our own inactive satellites as targets? If we have a functional ASAT system, why are we wasting it taking apart academic satellites that measure radiation? It doesn't seem like the target is worth the political fallout. Something like a recon bird or an ELINT platform would seem like a better use, at least to me.