Thursday, February 14, 2008

ROGUE SPY SATELLITE ATTACKS EARTH!

The headline "U.S. Plans to Shoot Down Broken Spy Satellite" is medium-interesting. The first half of the article--broken spy satellite carrying hazardous fuel will crash into earth soon, U.S. plans to shoot it down--sounds like it was pieced together from the same remnants of Cold War narrative they used to make Armageddon and Deep Impact. So, also medium-interesting.

But then you get to the end:

Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, said today that the "stated rationale for this shoot-down is simply not credible. "

"There has to be another reason behind this," he said. "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."

Much larger spacecraft, including Skylab, have fallen to Earth without injuries to people on the ground.

Some other reason like IT'S A VIGILANTE SPY SATELLITE COMING TO KILL US ALL? Like the world is going to end early next month when this "school-bus-sized" machine which has decided it would rather be in Bladerunner than Armageddon, thank you very much, and which let us know about our doom on Valentine's Day because it doesn't like manufactured holidays, enters the atmosphere and "reprograms" us into its little spy-satellite minions?

Just remember that you heard it here first. Maybe the little guy will like me for getting him free publicity.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Krepon's comment sounds suspiciously right. China shots down a satellite; China and Russia declare their support for a treaty to keep space demilitarized; Bush declares he can do whatever he wants in space and can stop anyone else from doing anything; and then we say we'll blow up a satellite of our own that's "dangerous," thus demonstrating our anti-satellite capability. Gee, how could we suspect them of anything underhanded?

It all could backfire, of course, like Iraq: we could fail to blow up the spy satellite and demonstrate again that Reagan's "star wars" program was something he watched at the movies, like many of his other ideas.

An Iowa cynic, snow-bound.