A number of people, including some who seem to be highly informed, have said that the real reason the US shot down the errant spy satellite had nothing to do with preventing hydrazine ‘pollution’. Rather, it was to prevent any of its components from falling into the wrong hands.
What kind of stuff could have survived a HOT and unplanned atmospheric re-entry, the resultant break-up, and a hard landing (or wet landing), and still be of value to an adversary? Is it really possible to perform “reverse engineering” on what are likely to be mere fragments of extremely sophisticated electronics, optics, etc.?
Of course, I don’t expect anyone (here) to have specifics (duh), but what’s your best guess? Even though there’s no factual answer, I’m putting this in GQ in order to get serious, educated ideas.
Well they do maitenence on satellites while they’re in orbit correct? From there I’d personally think there’s a rather small leap from “maitenence” to “Haha we just flew up there and took a component off your satellite!”
Also, it’s possible (not sure though) that satellites may have some sort of “black box” that can be salvaged. But again really not sure on that one.
Okay I wasn’t sure, but I was thinking possibly some enemy (in the future that has robust space-faring capabilities maybe someone in Europe decides they don’t like our face). And the black box may have data and details on the model of satellite to aid in recovery and possibly reconstruction. I’m sorry, I was just saying it was possible in my mind.
I was more addressing the “why would they shoot it down part, how the hell would they take stuff off it in teh first place” part. Sorry, i guess I didn’t completely get the gist of the question.
FWIW, here’s a photo of the biggest chunk of Skylab to survive the 1979 “de-orbiting”. Just how much value debris like this might have to anyone is open to question.
I was directly involved in the Columbia Space Shuttle recovery. You would be amazed at the amount of material that survived “intact.” I’m talking fabric, paper, electronic components, even body parts. Even some living experiments aboard the Shuttle survived intact and were successfully recovered weeks after the disaster.
On some of the actual recovery missions in the field, when we recovered something, a NASA engineer in our party more often than not was able to identify the part with little problem. I do recall one time we found a piece of woven fabric probably no bigger than the palm of your hand. The engineer not only identified the piece but the almost exact location of where it was on the Shuttle. You can probably infer that someone with the expertise could easily identify significant spy satellite parts as well.
Most countries guess or can infer about capabilities of spy sats, the resolution of the image , how long it can stay on station , and could it have a secondary image capability that would allow it to look sideways , when the bad guys have timed something to account for the passage of the sat.
What would survive is open to conjecture , but I am assuming that the states wanted to keep it secret longer and at the same time provided a useful abm shot.
One of my friends pointed out that it is also a handy way of pointing out to some other people out there that we too can shoot down satellites if we want to. Of course, we do it to protect the environment, because we love democracy and cute fuzzy animals.
The United States maintains several organizations whose functions include Foreign Materiel Exploitation – that is: getting, disassembling, and analyzing other countries’ military hardware. I’ve met folks who work in a few of these organizations and they are bloody smart. Just like the Cyberdyne guys in Terminator 2, or an archaeologist working off a toe joint and some ribs, they can infer a system’s capabilities and functions from only a few scorched parts. Of course a fully-operational MiG is even better, especially if it has an owner’s manual included… but failing that, they’ll take what they can get, and they work miracles on it.
…and we’re the country with the best toys already. Imagine how much money China or Russia would spend to find out our secrets.
