Satellite Shootdown (2008) Military Channel

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Oh February 20th 2008 the US Navy Cruiser Lake Erie departs Pearl Harbor Hawaii with 360 sailors aboard on an unprecedented mission I'm together and I said I can't tell you what we're gonna do we're gonna have to go do something that's really important when I first found out the specifics of what we were trying to accomplish Picard I was like no way holy mackerel you know we never trained for that before so you got to be crazy you know we're not designed to do that could not see that coming away out of blue the Lake Erie's mission is to shoot down USA 193 a defective spy satellite on a collision course with earth and carrying a thousand pounds of deadly toxic fuel the nature of this was global the nature of this was international no matter what kind of calculation we did we couldn't mitigate that risk to humans here on earth not to the point that that we could just turn our back if you have the capability of stopping something from happening that has a probability of causing harm and you don't take action and you live with yourself can you live with the consequences by 4:30 p.m. local time the Lake Erie's in position and gets the order to fire the wish of the launcher is what made it different this time and it puts a pretty good rumble and shake through the ship and you definitely know it leaves the launch is successful but there's no guarantee the missile will hit the wobbling bird tumbling through space at 17,000 miles per hour and that's the longest probably two and a half three minutes of your life is when you waiting there that was really kind of the nervous point of the whole mission looking got it looking looking kwa time to intercept 23 seconds baby lock lock only seconds to go before knowing if they've hit the target yet it will be longer still before they know if they've succeeded in their mission Vandenberg Air Force Base California December 14 2006 USA 193 a high-resolution radar spy satellite is launched aboard a delta 2 rocket we have liftoff yet as it reaches orbit ground controllers lose contact with the satellite USA 193 is now on its own despite attempts to regain control but the satellite orbits the earth for nearly a year closely monitored by the US Strategic Command Stratcom in Omaha Nebraska 193 was just a dead satellite and through the course of time all bodies in space that are not held in space by their own power will degrade that orbit and eventually come back down into the atmosphere most satellites that return to earth go through a controlled reentry that for safety and security reasons sends them crashing into the ocean the task is difficult because of the number of satellites both working and defective that orbit the earth to date as many as 3000 add to that another 600,000 pieces of non-working hardware called space debris zipping around earth at over 15,000 miles per hour when you understand the number of satellites that we track the number of pieces of space debris that there are some amazing calculations that have done every day just to protect the International Space Station protect the shuttle when she goes up and as many of those pieces of debris that we can avoid for gonna do that there's a lot of space debris they'll be tracking not only that we move our satellites out of the way of that space debris if we can congestion in space is one thing but the reentry of us a 193 presented another problem she's carrying about a thousand pounds of what we call hydrazine which is satellite fuel once we determined that that hydrazine was still in that dead satellite we started looking at the risk that satellite posed to humans here on earth hydrazine is a colorless toxic liquid fuel with an ammonia like odor a short-term exposure to it can produce a range of reactions from minor irritation of the eyes nose and throat to dizziness and nausea in the worst cases it can cause seizures coma even death now when we process that fuel on the ground we completely encapsulate the technicians in suits almost like space suits so that they are protected from the toxic vapors of that fuel so that is the degree to which we go to in protection on the ground and the folks that have to routinely handle this substance so you can have an impression as to why we Rico so concerned about the toxicity to an unprotected public a thousand pounds of unused hydrazine barreling uncontrollably toward Earth was a real threat the concern was that this had become very cold and very frozen fallen orbit and it would survive reentry it would heat during reentry and then that heating process it would be creating liquid and slush and paper with respect to the hydrazine then if it were to impact a populated area the tank would rupture upon impact and then you would have individuals exposed to the to the toxic fuel and toxic vapor by December 2007 analysis indicated the satellite would crash to earth by early March 2008 with oceans covering over 70% of the Earth's surface chances were likely it would land in water somewhere we couldn't be sure it's not an exact science there's no model it's going to say it's going to land here on this date at this precise time it just doesn't happen that way doesn't exist the analysis also calculated the odds of human casualties resulting from the hydrazine fuel tank rupturing it varied depending on which expert you talk to but anywhere from one in forty five to one and twenty five chance of that occurring those seem like small odds but in the business that we're in in our testing for example we will actually make a change in our test profiles if there's a possibility of any debris coming back in that could cause anything greater than a one in 10,000 chance of a casualty so by our business that was that was an unacceptable risk also unacceptable was the risk of letting the satellite fall to earth without taking any action even though we've had thousands of pieces of space debris come into the atmosphere we've never had one carrying a thousand pounds of hydrazine and no matter what kind of calculation we did we couldn't mitigate that risk to two humans here on earth not to the point there that we could just turn our back that was the president's conclusion after a secret White House briefing the satellite would have to be intercepted before reaching earth the president determined that that we just couldn't not pursue this with the thought that if we injured one one human life on on earth and had a capability to engage this satellite and did nothing then you know we we would be held held pretty responsible for that at the missile defense agency the job of reviewing possible missile intercept options felt a little general Henry Oberon and we started looking at what were the capabilities with our silo-based long-range interceptors or what we call our ground-based interceptors of Gd is we also looked at our terminal high altitude area defense interceptors the fad to see if they had any capability against the satellite overing also wanted to know if the Navy's Aegis ballistic missile defense system could do the job he contacted Rear Admiral Brad Hicks the Navy's Aegis program director we had to understand the object we were going it's physical dimensions its orbit characteristics which is called ephemeris data we had to build up that nut body of knowledge to then link what we thought what within our capabilities and what we could modify the capabilities to do the analysis said if feasible so we went back and reported yes it's feasible overing chose the aegis sea based option for the mission they were the easiest to modify because of the simplicity of the current kill vehicle that we have deployed it was on a mobile platform we were able to position the launch platform in an optimal location to both have the best shot of intercepting the the satellite as well as knowing where the debris would go modifying the aegis ballistic missile system to shoot down a satellite was technically feasible but there were still challenges ahead now big different train feasibility and execution that's a big leap a big leap that many believed could save lives if it could be done quickly you in early January 2008 an out-of-control US spy satellite carrying a thousand pounds of frozen toxic fuel was two months away from crashing to earth the fear was that the heat of reentry could cause the fuel called hydrazine to melt in the satellites storage tank depending on where the satellite hit the tank could burst open hits the ground breaches there's mixture of ice an icy liquidy substance it's going to evaporate pretty quickly and only takes a very small part in the atmosphere to put risk to human life the plan is to launch a Navy missile and intercept the satellite before it enters the Earth's atmosphere it would involve modifying the Navy's Aegis ballistic missile defense system the sea-based component protecting the United States from incoming missile attacks Aegis warships equipped with sm-3 have the capability to destroy incoming threats at ranges of hundreds to thousands of miles and in altitudes as high as 300 miles above the Earth's atmosphere radar on board detects and tracks the threat target the computer based weapon system calculates an interception point and what kite or missile to use then launches a missile aimed at destroying the target not by using explosives but instead by the sheer force of the collision that force is equivalent to a 10-ton truck hitting a wall at 600 miles an hour the satellite is moving extremely fast I think it's something in the vicinity of 1718 thousand miles an hour and so what you're basically doing is you're having a collision in space of two massive vehicles the kill vehicle self is not that NASA's let the the what we call the closing velocity or the relative speed that the two intercept in space is so high that you have this transfer of energy that basically turns the products into small pieces if not plasma and it's digis almost vaporized together because the energy generated is tremendous people talk about in the offense the difficulty of hitting a bullet with a bullet but I will tell you that where we are with the technology today we can do better than that we can hit a spot on a bullet with a bullet and that's actually what we do in our missile defense test since 1999 the Navy has tested its Aegis system using an interceptor called standard missile 3 or sm-3 by January 2008 the sm-3 had succeeded in in intercepting 12 of 14 test missiles proving a versatile high velocity weapon serves four stages on the the sm-3 missile the first stage is a mark 72 booster and it basically is designed to get the missile away from the ship it's a fairly short burn followed by the dual thrust rocket motor the mark 104 which is basically flies us out of the atmosphere about time we're clearing the atmosphere and losing aerodynamic control we drop that second stage and we have a third stage rocket motor that takes over and this was with its own reaction control system all this time we're getting updates from the ship as the tilma third stage rocket motor completes its second firing those updates from the ship provided are provided to the fourth stage with a kill vehicle or connect warhead which has its own targeting sensor it's got an infrared detector on it and it will detect the target and then eject from that third stage and it homes on the target and as we close on the target we make decisions to hit it in the lethal point yet while successful in anti-missile testing the aegis system has never been used against a satellite the system is not built for this mission set it's meant to go after a missile or aircraft in fact the weapon system is hardwired we have coated into it not to go after space objects such as satellites shooting down USA 193 would mean bringing together a team of experts in scientists from across the military government labs and the defense industry the team would have to reconfigure the Aegis system and the sm-3 interceptor for a mission less than eight weeks away and our initial reaction was you got to be crazy you know we're not designed to do that we need to know a lot of things we're going to do that and after a while it started to settle in that wow this is a challenge there was a certain amount of risk that we knew we had going into this mission or going into the execution of the mission given the time frame that we had and the work that had to be accomplished we had to literally get the engineering changes done in about three weeks that wasn't much time would be an understatement say there was frenetic level of activity those first few weeks frenetic activity was occurring in complete secrecy at key facilities across the country responsible for the aegis weapon system like Lockheed Martin at Morristown New Jersey it quickly evolved into a 24/7 operation we did not have our full teams here at Morristown working on it anyone else because of the nature of the mission we kept into a small set of people so that small set had to do more and did it around-the-clock also working around the clock were the sm-3 missile teams at Raytheon in Tucson Arizona we had a very short time frame January 4th came around they says we want you to go do this and oh by the way we want the missiles ready in the first week in February and that was a shock to to all of us on how we would do it a lot of people thought we couldn't do it we stood up three teams one was a performance and simulation team they were working to upgrade our simulation models to represent this target and the missile that we've designed to show how it would perform in this mission arena we stood up a design team to work down through the nuts and bolts and the design of the missile to see if there's anything you know in the details that would cause issue or concern with this kind of mission and then we stood up also a hardware team to work through the details of the preparations to pull the missiles from inventory and load new software in and get them read prepped for this mission and deployed out to the fleet the aegis system had to be retooled to see a satellite as a potential target we had to go into the system say ok if it is a space object we are still interested in so that was that was step number one then we had to make sure we did everything we needed to do to make sure that we acquired the correct space object after finding us a 193 now there was another task this object was travelling about three times faster than any object we had previously attempted to engage and that brought in unique challenges for the radar when we could acquire the object and convert it from a track of interest to an engagement rack and don't launch the missile over all the strategy called for intercepting the satellite just above the Earth's atmosphere to increase the chances of bringing it down in an unpopulated area so we wanted to intercept as low as we possibly could between two and three hundred kilometers which is in the endgame before the satellite really becomes unpredictable in its orbit the altitude deviations as the satellite goes around the earth become larger the closer the satellite gets to earth once you get down around two hundred and ten kilometers above the earth you start picking out the effects of the Earth's gravity and what we call solar winds above the atmosphere they cause your predictions of the orbit to change while this would be the first shoot-down attempt by a seagoing vessel this was not the first time a satellite had been shot from the sky in 1985 a u.s. fighter jet destroyed a US missile by firing a modified air-to-air missile from an altitude of 80,000 feet but that mission was different than shooting down USA 193 that was an anti-satellite test that was actually conducted by the Air Force to determine the feasibility of doing that with an airborne platform and a an airborne missile this was not a test of an anti satellite capability because we had to modify our interceptors the radar onboard the ship as well as the fire control system on the ship as well as integrate other sensors into the ship's weapons control system to affect the mission more recently in January 2007 China use the land-based missile to destroy a twenty-two hundred pound weather satellite orbiting a 528 miles above the earth spite the fact that China destroyed its own satellite protests from the world community centered on the resulting debris the higher the intercept the more debris is generated that will last longer in terms of orbital debris which is the concern is the longevity of the degree now if you look at the Chinese estate at first of all they intercepted very high in their orbit greater than 800 kilometers and that debris is much more persistent in terms of damaged orbiting objects that it could cause there will be space debris in orbit for the next hundred years after the Chinese anti-satellite attempt it's very high it poses a great risk to any of us that go into space it poses a huge risk to our satellites that we depend on every day in many regards they could have demonstrated something like that much much differently so we're gonna live with that debris and it's gonna affect everyone that's in space meanwhile USA 193 was on a trajectory hurdling wildly toward Earth success of the shoot-down mission depended not only on hitting the satellite but in destroying the tank containing the hydrazine fuel that meant there were long hours ahead for those in the shoot-down mission team and little time to waste you in mid-january 2008 a wayward US spy satellite with a half-ton of toxic fuel was six weeks away from crashing to earth across the u.s. teams of government researchers defense industry engineers and military personnel were secretly working on a plan to shoot down the satellite before it hit first they had to convert the Navy's Aegis anti-ballistic weapon system into an anti satellite system in general with a ballistic missile target you understand the trajectory is sort of dictated to you by where it's launched and when it burns out and then it just follows a ballistic path to its impact point with a satellite once it's launched and sent into orbit there is no impact point it's intended to stay in orbit for a number of years in this case we had a decaying orbit so it was going to have an impact point so the difference is how do I modify the system to deal with that different situation modifications that would normally take up to four years to do had to be done in three weeks experts at Lockheed Martin worked on the aegis weapon system software while those at Raytheon worked on the sm-3 missile scientists and engineers from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics lab and mi t--'s Lincoln labs were brought in to help you had to deal with issues that were built into the system prevent us from what we were doing there wasn't a lot of information available about what the satellite was doing and so we had to develop that and do a lot of that analysis in real time we were finding out is that yes we could hit the satellite but can we hit it in the right spot because in our basic design with ballistic missiles we go after the warhead or the payload so for this one which is an unusual shape a satellite much bigger than what we've ever gone at before we had to take that into consideration the odd shape in order to go to the right place that we wanted to hit and the area we wanted to hit was the hydrazine tank the satellites size and shape weren't the only considerations it also flew higher and three times faster than targets the aegis system was designed to intercept plus the satellite emitted no heat which made the sm-3 s infrared detector useless so we had to look at what that meant for us in in the design of the missile of men we wanted to hit the tank on this one so we spent an awful lot of time building very specific or specific as we can be models of in imagery models of what that target looks like so that we can run many many many simulations at various angles of approach to make sure that there's nothing in that imagery that would cause us to sway off the target or cause a problem the three-week timeframe left little margin for error Navy personnel were also involved every waking moment was given over to the mission collecting and inputting data running simulations analyzing outcomes and revising them a lot of the analysis that the team had to do was figure out what the satellite was doing at a particular time and then how the system would react how everything would come together to engage the satellite successfully every day we came in we called it Monday because that's the way it was it was as if every day was a Monday and of course Monday's are the longest days of the week it wasn't until we got down into the details specifically of the way the missile operated that we had a couple of changes that we identified that had to be made in order to just make sure that it the software would would be able to fly smoothly and intercept at the specific point we wanted to hit the target after three weeks the team's finished the work of modifying the aegis system and the sm-3 interceptor finished to a point in the end we didn't know to 100% whether we could do this and breach the hydrazine fuel tank because there were still variables that we couldn't figure out and close still modifying the system and the interceptor was only part of the task three Aegis equipped ships the USS Lake Erie the USS Decatur and the USS Russell were selected for the mission the USS Lake Erie the chief Naval Operations ballistic missile test ship would be the one to attempt the shoot-down which meant its crew would have to be retrained for this one-time only mission and we had to do a mind shift because the guys have been trained one a-and we're giving them a whole new capability temporary capability and as a big mindset a big paradigm shift so we had to understand it ourselves and be able to project that to the to the sailors to make sure this is not the same system that you've been working on before unique capabilities and we had to ensure that things were done correctly the three ships had their existing Aegis weapon systems disabled and replaced with new computer program media for the mission aboard the USS Lake Erie captain Randall Hendrickson oversaw days of mission rehearsals done in complete secrecy it's scenarios where we practice everything from shots that go the way they're supposed to to casualties in the missiles or casualties in the radar or induced casualties and consoles or or something doesn't go right that it's not a sequence that we know what to react it's instinctive when we go for a real mission we probably did upwards of 150 to 170 practice runs over about a two-week period where we really intensify the trains and we started getting into really practicing the event over and over again anything that could go wrong we tested for dud missiles a system spy radar dropping track all sorts of different variations we'd gone through hundreds of different scenarios over and over again we had a lot of training crammed into a small amount of time every time the satellite would come around we would be there on station watching in certain locations all over the Pacific even when we're ashore we were still doing drills and rotations just trying to get all of the unknown factors we could into the known category for over a month the aegis weapon systems and the missile modifications have been done in strict secrecy along with crew retraining and rehearsals then on February 14th with everything in place the US government went public with the shoot-down plan today we're reaching out to all countries and various organizations the UN some of its subordinate agencies the European Space Agency and NATO to inform them of the actions that we're describing to you today we wanted to be open because we wanted to explain and take our allies and take nations around the world through the logic that we went through as to why this was important to go do we believe that the window for this activity will start here in the next three or four days and will be open for about maybe as many as seven or eight days something that we needed to do to try to mitigate the threat from that very highly toxic fuel - to folks on the ground and this could have come with this could have come back in anywhere this could have come back in over the United States it could have come back in over Europe over Asia any of those nations could be put at risk at this so the nature of this was global the nature of this was international almost anything that we can do with this turns out to be either neutral or better neutral is if we miss nothing changes so there is almost nothing we can do here that makes it worse almost everything we can do technically makes it better which was a very strong factor waiting waiting the decision with the world community now aware of the mission the focus turned to where the shoot-down attempt would take place in the Pacific Northwest of Hawaii a lot of it was driven by the vast number of sensors available to us at the Pacific missile test range as far as radars visual optical sensors that also was where with the SPX radar the x-band radar that was afloat was near it gave us connectivity we needed to come in and control very robust the other issue not only hit the hydrazine tank but minimize the effects of the brewing when you look at that the first few orbits after intercept were the greatest risk of the debris coming down on those first few orbits most of those orbits were over water post intercept or really sparsely populated areas of the earth so that was another major consideration for doing the intercept here the other issue why do the intercept of Hawaii was because the the satellite was cold it never activated and because we have an infrared seeker that not good so we wanted to get an ascending orbit where the Sun where we got the effects of the Sun heating the satellite and maximizing that illumination before it headed in to how the sun's effect and get the intercept there with the Lake Erie ready over a dozen agencies throughout the military the government and industry also prepared for the mission US Strategic Command Stratcom based at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha Nebraska would oversee the mission with support from across the country the joint space operations center at Vandenberg Air Force Base California would coordinate space-based center tracking for the intercept the army led joint integrated missile defense team in Colorado Springs Colorado would use large ground-based radars and telescopes to observe the mission in mid-february the window of opportunity for the shoot-down attempt was nearing each day there would be one window of opportunity for the launch lasting for no more than 10 to 15 seconds which means the Lake Erie would have to be poisoned ready at exactly the right place at the right time with conditions near too perfect to take a shot sure to be watched around the world that day would be Wednesday February 20th on the morning of February 20th 2008 the USS Lake Erie left Pearl Harbor Hawaii to shoot down an out-of-control satellite before it crashed to earth the ship's Aegis anti-ballistic missile system have been reconfigured for the task two specially modified sm-3 interceptors have been loaded aboard and its crew had rehearsed the mission meanwhile the military's network of sensors for tracking the satellite was on alert we had sensors from Massachusetts to New Mexico to California to Hawaii all engaged in this we had folks of course deployed across the entire United States to be able to affect this as well with the satellite traveling 17,000 miles an hour three times faster than a missile the Lake Erie could not rely on its own radar system to launch the interceptor by the time the ship's radar was able to detect the satellite the satellite would been passed in the Interceptor couldn't catch it so we had to inject off-board information into the ship's fire control system to be able to affect the intercept what that allowed us to do was to fire the interceptor well before the ship's radar saw that and then be able to guide the final guidance to the target using the ship's radar but even if the ship's radar was not able to pick it up we still could have used that off board information to affect the intercept one other factor determined the timing of the attempt the space shuttle Atlantis was nearing the end of its mission the shoot-down was delayed until the spacecraft landed to prevent any debris from the satellite striking it as an added precaution a quick response team was ready to help with hydrazine or any debris wherever either might fall we formed a taskforce of professionals from all over the United States DoD and interagency and US Transportation Command u.s. Transcom provided us with four c-17 Globemaster aircraft to stage the gear the team was put on a one-hour timeline to recall and could deploy anywhere in the world within an hour if a country had requested that that capability aboard the USS Lake Erie even among sailors not directly involved with a mission there was a sense of urgency one of my division officers great great young ensign was thinking about taking leave and he said he said he came to me one day and said I don't want to take leave anymore and I said well why not and he said well we're about to go save the world I want to be on board for it so he didn't have any idea what was going on but he knew it was big and that was the feeling a lot of a lot of the crew the countdown began 10 hours before launch from Stratcom mission headquarters in Omaha Nebraska and it's just like preparing for any other any other type major event you're you're double-checking your cross checking to make sure that everything you've got is correct and then at about 45 minutes prior when everything is green all the systems are go the checklist is continuing the ship's are happy everything is coming together by mid-afternoon the satellite came around the Earth on its final orbit we had a track on it and we knew that from that point it was gonna be show time as confident as the mood was during the countdown Rear Admiral Hicks still endured a moment of doubt a lot of us in the military used to looking for Murphy you know Murphy's going to come up come up with a wild card throw something throw a monkey wrench and everything we kept wondering what is that what's going to come up I was very confident we could hit the satellite what I was concerned about was hitting the satellite in the precise spot there were two modified missiles aboard the Lake Erie and a narrow window of opportunity to execute the mission we wanted the redundancy of a second missile in case we either missed or we hit it in the wrong spot because we were really going for the tank obviously if the Lake Erie missed the satellite with the first shot it would likely have to wait a day to try again but the longer the wait the more difficult it would be to shoot down the satellite as it gathered speed falling towards the Earth by 4:30 p.m. local time the Lake Erie's in position and awaits word from the US Secretary of Defense to proceed everything is coming together then you can sit there and maybe hold your breath for a little bit or take a breath for a couple minutes and and realize the gravity of what what you're attempting to do the message you come across that the secretary had given the go-ahead on the mission and given us weapons release Authority now the moment of truth to see whether six weeks of preparation and training will pay off like you're sitting in your living room watching a television set and a train goes by with the horn going it vibrates extensively especially with a missile of this size it's extremely loud the launch is successful the sm-3 ascends skyward at five thousand miles per hour below deck there's over two minutes to go before the crew will know anything and that's the longest probably two and a half three minutes of your life is when you wait in there and it all kind of said again that we're not done yet we need to need to let that Eagle fly out and and see what happens thank you Scott seconds to go before knowing if they picked the target intercept but longer still before knowing if they succeeded in their mission when satellites shoot down returns you On February 20th 2008 the USS Lake Erie was northwest of Hawaii on a special mission at 4:30 p.m. local time the cruiser fired a modified sm-3 missile toward a satellite in a decaying orbit above the earth and carrying 1/2 ton of toxic fuel a network of sensors spanning seven times unmonitored to launch including stations in Morristown New Jersey Huntsville Alabama and Colorado Springs Colorado everything's gonna go right at this point you know the radars got a track the missile is a compiler block things have to open up correctly it has to transition from boost third stage rocket motor has to light off and so you're constantly monitoring the flight as it goes as well as looking at the radar track three minutes after launch before stage sm-3 was into the atmosphere guided by radar data from the ship Rear Admiral Douglas McLane was in Omaha Nebraska part of the team at Stratcom overseeing the mission we got the missile was away and then it was just trying to see what sensors were feeding data the missile moved to its first three stages in the terminal phase the kinetic warhead would seek out the satellite and try to lock on to it the seeker had had about 15 to 20 seconds to the lock on it and guide to the to the dead satellite it's tumbling in a 3-axis tumble and if you can just think of a school bus tumbling through space we had to hit that school bus pretty much one-third the way down from the front bumper and engage that hydrazine tank at 22,000 miles per hour looking looking looking oh it's got it I think it's got kwa time to intercept 23 seconds everybody was huddled around it especially in the last terminal phase bunch of us were watching the kinetic warhead video the downlink from the warhead itself normally we're used to that 15 to 20 seconds we've seen those final frames then it happened I got a glimpse of it but and then I looked at the radar and I could just tell it was you know right between the goalposts and it was just incredible I was paying attention of my a scope and instantly there was just clutter I knew right off the bat that it was success I knew that we had hit the satellite sensor data confirmed the missile had hit the satellite the force of the collision was like a 10-ton truck slamming into a wall at 600 miles an hour but the mission wasn't over then it was a question of did we hit it in the right spot did we hit where we wanted to hit do we hit the tank and it took several hours after that to to look at all the different dead that we had proof the hydrazine tank was destroyed would come in several ways lieutenant general Oberon monitored the mission from his office near Washington DC we were looking for a a very distinctive spread pattern on those range radars that indicate a wide dispersal of debris from the hydrazine we were looking in our electro optical sensors to see whether we had a Halfmoon shaped cloud that would indicate the presence of hydrazine from the intercept I felt good about the intercept but I wanted absolute confidence it's kind of like kicking a field goal in the fog I wanted to be sure we killed the hydrazine tank and it took us about an hour before I felt I had every data source in from all those sensors then it was a sense of relief despite the euphoria aboard the Lake Erie the ship prepared to move to a second site and launch another missile and so while all those sensors were looking we called the bridge and said okay here's the next predicted point that's downrange and let's start driving there until someone says you don't need to drive there so it was about two maybe three hours later we got the call that said we're pretty sure you hit it in the lethal spot now so you can turn around start heading towards Pearl we were able to to correlate that with the other pieces of data from the aircraft and from in terms of the the imagery and the spectrometry so we were very pleased that we were able to successfully destroy satellite yet even with the satellite and the hydrazine tank destroyed the mission was not complete then the work really began after after the intercept because we started tracking all the pieces of debris and as time went by we became more assured that we had completely annihilated that dead satellite the world had watched the mission and witnessed its success many made their appreciation noon so it took us a while to get back into homeport and at that point we were seeing the internet people were sending this note saying you know congratulations and thanks and yeah I I was overwhelmed frankly the number it was very gratifying 99.9% of the notes were you know we're very proud of you it's a terrific job way to go and you know from retired Navy personnel to other services on active duty and retired and just regular Americans saying hey this is great so really didn't strike us until we pulled in a home port saw the sort reception on the crowd you know support we got from the mobile it was just terrific yet there were critics who questioned the necessity of shooting down the satellite come I said well you know you had a natural reentry and let it burn off well okay understand this I couldn't find one scientist one and I was dealing with some of the best minds in the country I couldn't find one that said it was going to burn up because it was spherical it was frozen and they said and if it lands it would be bad now somebody said well likelihood it's the land in water but we couldn't be sure it's not an exact science if it hadn't landed in a populated area it had killed people how could we have looked at anybody said we chose to do nothing when we could have done something if you have any capability of stopping something from happen happening that has a probability of causing harm and you don't take action then what is the regret factor in living the consequences can you live knowing that we decided to do nothing for either political reasons or for diplomatic reasons some suggested the mission was intended to warn China and other nations of the u.s. military's anti satellite capability we did not demonstrate this capability to show anyone that we had an anti satellite capability we engaged that that dead satellite to mitigate the risk horse to humans on the earth people do ask me hey this was you now have an anti satellite capability no we don't we took the modifications off the ships once they pulled into port we took the missiles back to Raytheon they're actually already been modified to return to the fleet as a listing missile configure around those software mods are gone there's not a on the shelf capability we have an understanding of what it takes now but he's not a standing capability debris tracking continued following the shoot-down as we tracked the space debris we could not find a piece that was bigger than a size of a football maybe the site of your hand we thought for sure in the first couple of orbits most stuff would come down in about two orbits and we track some pieces but we have still not had a report of the space debris I'm making it to the ground which tells you that it was it was small enough pieces that that Earth's atmosphere burned it up on re-entry by the end of 2008 there will be no more space debris so a pretty big accomplishment that we can engage that satellite and have all the debris down inside 12 months the success of the mission proved the aegis weapon systems and the sm-3 interceptor were adaptable but it also proved what a unified effort from the military government and the defence industry could achieve in a short time I still can't describe the awesomeness of all the talent all the people all the resources that were involved in this but how quickly it all came together we executed the mission and it's just phenomenal it was an incredible amount of work buying off a lot of people awful awful lot of great minds spent off a lot of late nights all over all over America planning this thing executing it looking at it from all the different directions leaving politics and everything else out they took an amazing system and made it one of a kind for for a brief moment and proud of all it was very proud to be a part of that as I look back on the operation we went from a standing start to be able to accomplish this mission in a little over six weeks which is a dramatic in today's environment I was asking questions and I was demanding answers that would normally take a year or more it seemed like to be able to get and I was getting that in a matter of days just an incredible team effort it was very proud to be a part of such a dynamic and talented team I don't think that any challenge cannot be met by the technology and by the by the Italian of the American people when we put our minds to do something you

Info

Channel: vhsclassic90s

Views: 336,795

Rating: 4.4591999 out of 5

Keywords: Satellite Shootdown, Military Channel, Discovery Channel, Discovery Communications, Silver Spring, Maryland, 2008, TV Movie

Id: c09m-2qiMgE

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 45min 13sec (2713 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2013

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