• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

US military satellite explodes above Earth

Renae

Banned
Suspended
DP Veteran
Joined
Aug 26, 2007
Messages
50,241
Reaction score
19,243
Location
San Antonio Texas
Gender
Female
Political Leaning
Conservative
US military satellite explodes above Earth - Telegraph

A US military satellite exploded after detecting an unexplained “sudden spike in temperature”, sending dozens of chunks of debris tumbling into different orbits around Earth.Civilian company CelesTrak was first to notice the explosion of the once-secret weather satellite and the US Air Force subsequently confirmed that it had been lost.

The satellite was an ageing component of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program which the US military began developing the in the 1960s to help plan reconnaissance and surveillance missions. In 1972 the system was declassified, and data made available to civilian scientists.

The lost satellite was the 13th to be launched as part of DMSP, designated DMSP-F13, and had been in Earth orbit since 1995.

Air Force Space Command confirmed to SpaceNews.com that the “catastrophic event” came after “a sudden spike in temperature” was detected, followed by “an unrecoverable loss of attitude control”.

The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect,[SUP][1][/SUP][SUP][2][/SUP] collisional cascading or ablation cascade), proposed by the NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade—each collision generating space debris which increases the likelihood of further collisions.[SUP][3][/SUP] One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space exploration, and even the use of satellites, unfeasible for many generations.[SUP][3][/SUP]
Kessler syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Also, what if something shot it down?? Or better, a country did?
 
Well that doesn't happen everyday. Wonder if we shot our own sat down as part of a weapons test......
 
Well that doesn't happen everyday. Wonder if we shot our own sat down as part of a weapons test......

It's a thought. But regardless of how, the issue at the moment is uncontrolled debris, the Kessler Syndrome is bad ju ju.
 
It's a thought. But regardless of how, the issue at the moment is uncontrolled debris, the Kessler Syndrome is bad ju ju.

Worse for the Chinese and Russians than for us. We have no way to put a man in orbit at the moment.
 
Worse for the Chinese and Russians than for us. We have no way to put a man in orbit at the moment.

It's not just manned missions, Communication satellites, weather, GPS...

Bad ju ju.
 
It's not just manned missions, Communication satellites, weather, GPS...

Bad ju ju.

Half of ours blow up on the ground anyways, so again, no big deal :2razz:
 
It's not just manned missions, Communication satellites, weather, GPS...

Bad ju ju.

Here's my thinking -

Obama wants to grant amnesty to a few million illegal aliens who will all need jobs and the liberals love to spend money to stimulate the economy so what I'm thinking is that we could send Jeh Johnson to Home Depot to pick up 3,000,000 leaf blowers for $120 each and then we could send all 3,000,000 illegals into space to clean up. That'd kill two or three birds with one stone.
 
It's been hanging around up there for 20 years then all of a sudden spikes in temp and explodes? That is odd. Would getting hit by another object cause such a temp spike? I would think a laser would do the trick. But wouldn't an enemy country hit something more significant and if we secretly did it to ourselves as a test wouldn't we shoot something down that wouldn't be reported?

Interesting mystery.
 
This is why we need to colonize the Earth-Moon system.
 
Here's my thinking -

Obama wants to grant amnesty to a few million illegal aliens who will all need jobs and the liberals love to spend money to stimulate the economy so what I'm thinking is that we could send Jeh Johnson to Home Depot to pick up 3,000,000 leaf blowers for $120 each and then we could send all 3,000,000 illegals into space to clean up. That'd kill two or three birds with one stone.

If this is such a liberal thing to do why did a conservative come up with it, eh?

Check and mate.
 
If this is such a liberal thing to do why did a conservative come up with it, eh?

Check and mate.

Are you kidding? There is no way this would be a liberal solution. It would only cost $357 Million in leaf blowers and a few space flights. We could probably knock the whole thing out for less than $1 Billion. No liberal solution would come close to that. If it didn't cost at least $500 Billion and 30 years of impact studies they'd never even consider it.
 
It's been hanging around up there for 20 years then all of a sudden spikes in temp and explodes? That is odd. Would getting hit by another object cause such a temp spike? I would think a laser would do the trick. But wouldn't an enemy country hit something more significant and if we secretly did it to ourselves as a test wouldn't we shoot something down that wouldn't be reported?

Interesting mystery.

The AF did not report it until after a private company noticed it was missing. temp spike could be a short circuit I suppose.
 
It's been hanging around up there for 20 years then all of a sudden spikes in temp and explodes? That is odd. Would getting hit by another object cause such a temp spike?

If it did get hit by a piece of space junk, it'd depend on where on the satellite it got hit. And if it wasn't junk, sudden failures aren't uncommon anyway....especially in a 20 year old satellite. If it were something that was recently put up there, then foul play would be more suspected.
 
I believe almost NOTHING from U.S. military press releases without unbiased confirmation.

Maybe a satellite exploded.

Or maybe it got hit by something and the Air Force used it as an excuse to try and scare Congress into increasing their space defense budget by exaggerating what happened.
 
Governments have been known to explode their own weather satellites, so that is a possibility. But the earth's lower orbit is filled with so much debris that it could've just as easily been a collision with a speck of paint, too.....


Space Junk: Tracking & Removing Orbital Debris
 
A lot of satellites have a sort of nuclear battery, maybe it just overheated and melted something important.

Or Aliens hit it with a laser.
 
A lot of satellites have a sort of nuclear battery, maybe it just overheated and melted something important.

Or Aliens hit it with a laser.

Most likely a component failed on a very old satellite. But we can't rule out that it was targeted.
 
A military. Overheating is a major problem in space, probably even more so with satellite pushing 50 years old.

And what kind of weapons system would cause overheating?
 
Back
Top Bottom