Humanity Just Witnessed Its First Space Battle

Even though this is a mid-course interception, it's critical that we contrast it with America's GMD (ground-based mid-coure defense). GMD is targeting ICBM payloads, which travel faster and are more likely to have countermeasures. GMD is still unproven for targets without homing beacons on realistic trajectories. Long and the short of it: this doesn't mean America could successfully intercept incoming nukes from North Korea.

the newsworthy part is not the ballistic missile launch but the interception in space, where velocity is lowest but maneuvering is most difficult

though to me the biggest news was that yemen's houthi rebels have ballistic missiles now

There was an Islamist revolution in 1979 in Iran. The new rulers despised Israel long before attaining power. Before that the two countries had excellent relations.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution installed the Islamic Republic and repudiated the previous government's relatively amicable diplomatic relations with Israel.

> Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, brought about a new worldview that predominantly championed Islam and argued for standing up to “arrogant” world powers and their regional allies, who would oppress others – including Palestinians – to serve their own interests.

> This meant that Israel became known in Iran as the “Little Satan” to the “Great Satan” that is the US.

> “To overcome both the Arab-Persian divide and the Sunni-Shia divide, Iran adopted a much more aggressive position on the Palestinian issue to brandish its leadership credentials in the Islamic world and to put Arab regimes allied with the United States on the defensive,” he said.

> The two are alleged to be behind a long series of attacks on each other’s interests within and outside their soils, which they publicly deny. This has become known as a “shadow war” that has increasingly spilt out into the open as hostilities grew.

> Tehran opposes US hegemony in the Middle East while Israel has consistently pushed back against any efforts in Washington to bring American troops home from the region. Iran-linked groups have regularly attacked US bases in Iraq and Syria.

> It’s a “rivalry for dominance and power in the region, the two states have been embroiled in a low-level war for more than a decade,” said Parsi.

The US destroyed the regime in Iraq whose location and simultaneous hostility toward Israel and Iran was a mitigator working against the other forces driving Israel and Iran against each other, as it often gave Israel and Iran common interests.

The shah, with US backing, ran a brutal, oppressive regime until 1979, when he was overthrown by a revolution led by the Islamist, theocratic ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini [edit: Khomeini seems to have led one faction, which eventually seized power from the others; see below]. Khomeini's people broke into the US embassy (a major diplomatic violation - even warring parties maintain embassies) and took over 50 hostages, who they held for over a year; one demand was that the US send them Pahlavi (Egypt granted him asylum eventually).

That government still runs Iran, though via Khomeini's political decendents. They see the US as probably their greatest threat, and the US treats Iran as a major enemy. In the 1980s, the US helped Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein fight a war with Iran, including using poison gas. These days, high-ranking US leaders periodically talk of attacking Iran and the US maintains economic sanctions against the country.

Israel is the closest US ally in the region and is seen by Iran as a US proxy, and the US and its allies are seen as competitors for regional power, with the Arabian Peninsula between Iran and Isreal being a sort of battleground. Both countries routinely threaten attacks against each other. Also, to some degree, Israel is a seen by Iran as a Western colony imposed on the Middle East.

Edit: I shouldn't assume this part is known: Iran routinely attacks US interests and destabilizes the region in its drive to dominate the Middle East, and also aligns itself at times with Russia. Particularly, now that the US deposed Hussein in neighboring Iraq, Iran has strong influence there (I think they are the only two majority Shia countries in the world). They also helped Assad in Syria fight a civil war to defeat a powerful revolution, forming a very strong bond; and they have long been the major supporters of Hezbollah, the terrorist/insurgent and Shia group that controls southern Lebanon. If you look at a map, that means Iran now has a logistical route to the Israeli border - they can drive trucks there - as well as influencing a large part of the Middle East.

I know you were just posing this rhetorically, but I love the folks above that are responding as if this is something that can be answered adequately in the hacker news comment section

First I've heard of anything like this. How credible is the info and how likely is it to happen?

We are out of the demo zone. We've had lots of 'demo's of interceptors.

Now it just got real. When products move from 'testing' to 'customer'.

Not only can a small adversary launch a ballistic, the defenses also worked.