I remember seeing an interview on CNN with the late King Hussein of Jordan during the Gulf War. He was questioned about Iraqi Scud missles going through Jordanian airspace to reach Israel. He claimed that the missles did not actually go through Jordan, but rather were launched from Iraq, went into space, and then landed in Israel.
Is there any likelyhood to this claim?
The scud, last I checked, is not a ballistic missile. That means it never acheives level flight, it just goes up (during launch) and down (on the final descent). This is cheap and easy to do, because you don’t have to have any kind of avionics on the missile to fiddle with, and the missiles are cheap to produce, because they’re motors (or engines? I confuse the two.) with warheads attached, but it is the least accurate way, because the missile cannot correct its course. It’s like a lawn dart: You try to aim it when you launch it, and you trust gravity to get it in the right place.
Because of all that, I think the scuds might have gone into space (How many miles above sea level is that defined as? Eleven?). They were going up anyway, and they had pretty strong (motors or engines) attached. Maybe the scuds couldn’t have, physically, survived re-entry, and therefore couldn’t have survived a trip into space. They didn’t achieve orbit, obviously. The more I think of scuds in space, the more I doubt it. Iraq didn’t have any reason to give their (rather cheap) missiles the power to leave Earth’s atmosphere, and in fact leaving the atmosphere might have ruined them (see my re-entry comment above). They just wanted to terrorize Israel into attacking them, so they could claim a moral high ground among Arabs when they attacked them and forced the US into more war than we would fight.
Why Jordan would have claimed scuds went through space is beyond me. Not to second-guess the dead, but King Hussein should probably just have said he thought the US were doing an admirable job of taking care of them. But that’s another thread…
I think the reason Hussein claimed that was as a response to the possibility that Israel would violate Jordanian airspace to attack Iraq on their own. He objected to that possibility, but then was addressed with the point that Jordan allowed the scuds to go through its territory. He then claimed the outer space theory.
Actually, the Scud is a ballistic missile, in that it flies in a ballistic arc, as you described. Anyway, they reach an altitude of around 50 km (that 's about 160,000 feet). What altitude does space start? I think space is considered to begin much higher than that.
AFAIK the most common claim for the start of space is 160km. Of course there is not a definative line. Unlike sea level where you can pint to an exact transition between air and water, the upper atmosphere just keeps getting thiner.
Some theories are that space begins only at 1000 km(that’s about 600 miles)above sea level.As mentioned,there is no definite point because the atmosphere just fades away.In any case,100 miles or 160 km sounds about reasonable(doubt that a missile could go higher).
Did any scientists confirm his claim?
After some searching at britannica.com, I couldn’t find where space was assumed to start, but 50km is considered to be the upper boundary of the stratosphere. So, a Scud in flight is still within the atmosphere at the peak of it’s ballistic arc.
Jet Jaguar is right. Here is an Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file that gives a graphical picture of how a ballistic missile works. I was correctly thinking that scuds are not cruise missiles and wrongly thought that cruise == ballistic. In fact, cruise missiles are the exact opposite of ballistic missiles.
Cecil says