Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

You are referring to the 2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile test, during which the Chinese FY-1C weather satellite was intentionally destroyed by a "kinetic kill vehicle".

But FY-1C was at an orbit height of 865 kilometres, and the ISS orbits at less than half that altitude.

It's not impossible for debris to have reached the ISS, but it is unlikely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...

View on HN

From your link: "As of April 2019, 3000 of the 10,000 pieces of space debris routinely tracked by the US Military as a threat to the International Space Station were known to have originated from the 2007 satellite shoot down.". This does not make it seem unlikely to me.

That test is still responsible for 30% of debris up there. And is scattered across quite a wide band of orbital altitudes.

Another amazingly horrifying example is Project West Ford[0] in 1963 which dispersed 480 000 000 copper needles at an altitude of ~3500 km to create an artificial ionosphere facilitating military communications.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford

Project Obvious Idioms ended in utter failure when the haystacks were lost, creating a conundrum of Biblical proportions.

Who thought it would be a great, timeless idea to dump a bunch of copper wire strands at 3.5 Mm? Oh, it was that pinhead: Walter E. Morrow. Thanks for that military-industrial complex contribution to littering. Let's stick a Tesla, Lego, and some dead people in space while we're at it. We did that already too? Why don't you tell me these things? Throw me a frickin bone here, people. Maybe we should think carefully about permanent space garbage or space sunshades before rolling with what seems like a brilliant technical solution?

“The orbit and design of the individual needles were chosen to promote rapid orbital decay and reentry into the atmosphere.”. However needles unexpectedly clumped and there are clumps of them still orbiting.

Scroll down to page three of: https://www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/pdfs/o...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com