The War On Falling Stuff.

Tired of the war on terror? Yeah, I think everyone's middle east attention-span is about tapped out by now. But luckily the Bush administration has found a new fear-well to tap. Death from above! Well, I guess its not a new source, they just couldn't wait for that rogue meteor to come an kill us all. A satellite is out of control and plummeting towards the earth! But they've got a plan, so its okay. But it still might be dangerous. And so on and so on; its gonna be okay because we're in control of the situation but you should still be scared because you might die.

"An out-of-control, school-bus-size U.S. spy satellite ... begins its plunge to Earth"
That's bad.

"Been working on the missile modifications for the past three weeks."
That's good.

"The satellite is carrying a substantial amount of hydrazine, a hazardous rocket fuel."
That's bad?

"[The] missile will be fired as the satellite reenters the atmosphere and has a reasonably high opportunity for success.'"
That's good.

"An uncontrolled reentry on or about March 6"
That's bad.

"We cannot predict the entry impact area."
That's bad.

"More than half the pieces will burn up or land before making two
revolutions around Earth, and the rest will come down in weeks, maybe
a month, but it's a very finite period of time that we can manage."
That's good?

"It could leak gas and cause potentially fatal injury [across] an area
the size of about two football fields."
That's not so bad.

"In the history of the space age, there has not been a single human
being who has been harmed by man-made objects falling from space."
Oh, that's good.

"Similar to chlorine or to ammonia in that when you inhale it, it
affects your tissues in your lungs," adding: "It has the burning
sensation. If you stay very close to it and inhale a lot of it, it
could in fact be deadly."
That sounds terrible.

"Trying to reduce the danger to human beings [and Rogue satellites want to eat your babies.]"
Ah! Someone save me!


Just effing shoot it down and lets move on.

• Navy Will Attempt to Down Spy Satellite - washingtonpost.com

It Wasn't A Warning Shot, It Was A Camera.

I love plans for the future, especially when they were devised in the past. Take for example this plan for an interstellar mission from 1973. The members collaborated on a method to send instruments to a near star system within the span of a human life while only using near-future technology. It was called the Daedalus Project; with a name like that how could it not work?

The plan (keeping in mind that this is a grievous summary) was to use a nuclear pulse rocket to accelerate the probe to 135,000,000 km/h. (the current fastest space-bound projectile is Pioneer 10 at 51,810 km/h) This rocket would trigger 250 tiny nuclear bombs per second for two straight years before moving on to stage two. In all the propulsion would consume 46,000 tons of deuterium and helium-3, and the craft would have to pit-stop at Jupiter to collect this fuel. Ac few years before the fifty year mission's conclusion several pods would split off the mother ship and record whatever they pass. The instruments will try to gather as much data as possible as they hurtle through the system at 3,750,000 m/s because they'll have no means of deceleration.

Goodness, lets hope there isn't someone we might piss off by shooting at them.

• Damn Interesting » The Daedalus Starship