Posted 2/20/2008 06:49:00 PM by Douglas

So the shuttle landed today, clearing the skies for the Navy to shoot down a rogue, toxic satellite. Why does this story stink to low-earth orbit? Oh, Ida know, maybe it's listening to their own, errant, bullshit that doesn't fill me with a lot of hope:

On the first part of the kind of the sequence of information and how this is unfolding, one of the criteria that I laid out when we started in the last briefing was that we weren't going to do anything until we had the shuttle on the ground. So the shuttle's coming down here in the next few minutes, if it's not down now. It's down.

So we're now into the window, okay, the length of the window. There's some significant ambiguity at the back end of the window, based, as I said at the time, on how high the atmosphere is on any given day, because that then tells you when the satellite naturally would start to hit the atmosphere. So we want to catch it before it naturally hits the atmosphere, because when it hits the atmosphere, it tumbles and it's next to impossible to track.

So we're pretty comfortable right now that we'll have windows available to us through about the 29th or 30th. And then after that it will really start to become, let's say, more ambiguous, because we're trying to predict the weather out that far. So that's kind of the period, starting today and running basically out to about the 29th.

One Royal Bullshit story after another one. First, you have to wait 'till the shuttle lands? What about all the other satellites in low-earth orbit that mankind relies on for navigation and communication? What about, oh, Ida know, the freakin' International Space Station? What is that, chopped liver?

But more importantly, what about the window that's open 'till the 29th or the 30th? This story says

Left alone, the satellite would be expected to hit Earth during the first week of March.

So. . . first week in March and it's leaving a penile rivulet of hydrazine in the mud somewhere, right? So why does a "SR. MILITARY OFFICIAL" say their window for shooting it down is open 'till the 29th or 30th. . . .of February? Are they really that slow? Sadly, that story was posted on the D.O.D's own webpage, so it would seem that they are.

Sleep tight, world!