The good ol’ days are back again… about 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday the first high-speed impact between two intact spacecraft occurred. One way to look at this is the collision, between a spacecraft operated by U.S. communications group Iridium Satellite LLC and a Russian Cosmos-2251 military satellite, was the opening salvo in a space war that will only end in the destruction of civilization as we know it. Or it was just another blunder in the long history of flawed space technology.
Of course the usual suspects are out in full force explaining this away:
NASA:
“We knew this was going to happen eventually,” said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA believes any risk to the international space station and its three astronauts is low. It orbits about 270 miles below the collision course.
A spokesman for the Russian civilian space agency, Alexander Vorobyev, said on state-controlled Channel I television that “for the international space station, at this time and in the near future, there’s no threat.”
Thanks guys. I feel confident in your professional opinion. Now lets go to an independent source University College London’s Francisco Diego:
“This is an event that really makes us realize that things are not so straightforward as we originally thought,” said Francisco Diego, a senior research fellow in physics and astronomy. “I couldn’t put a number on the probability of this happening again, but now that it has happened, it changes things a lot and it becomes a concern. The problem with collisions like this is that they don’t destroy satellites, they just create smaller ones, like fast moving shotguns, that are potentially much more damaging.”
Space is now full of fast moving shotguns… awesome.
