Ditto that.
At six o’clock in the morning on January 12, 2007, a Chinese DF-21 missile launched from the Songlin test facility near Xichang, Sichuan, lifted a “kinetic kill vehicle” (KKV) into a near-space intercept trajectory for the orbit of a Chinese Fengyun 1-C weather satellite 500 miles above China. After it maneuvered to within a short distance of the weather satellite, the missile warhead fired the KKV, guided by illumination from a ground-based targeting laser, and, at 6:28 am, destroyed it.
Use of ground-based laser targeting could severely limit the usefulness of this technique, calling into question how many of these sophisticated trackers there are, and how many locations across the country might be needed.
Satellites in medium Earth orbit and geostationary orbit are not vulnerable to the direct-ascent ASAT system boosted by the two-stage DF–21 launcher. Although China has demonstrated the ability to launch satellites into geostationary orbits using larger rockets, the techniques required to reach higher orbits would significantly alter the dynamics for an effective hit-to-kill KKV, making the current ASAT design unusable for such purposes.
China is unlikely to be able to permanently disable most U.S. space assets in the near-term or midterm. The current U.S. trend towards employing constellations of small satellites, dispersing capabilities among a number of satellites, reduces the vulnerability to the loss of any single satellite and complicates efforts to target U.S. space capabilities. It also increases the robustness of the system by creating redundancies.
I sure hope it doesn’t come to this...the consequences will be irreversible. You think the environmental nuts are bad now, just wait till we’re all dead because we’ve blocked out the sun from space debris. Okay it’s not that bad. But if we start blowing things up in LEO or GEO, forget about the ISS, the Shuttle, Ares/Orion, Soyuz, Shenzhou. It’s all down the tubes, no more space flight for generations. Those little shards stay in orbit for a LONG time and can cause TONS of damage. Think of something the size of a pebble traveling 18000mph. Game, set and match. Just neutralize their capability to do this in the first place and be done with it.
BTTT!