NORAD asleep at the wheel again.

So a Russian rocket eners the Earth's atmosphere over the U.S. and NORAD isn't even placed on alert? I guess nobody thought it could have been a surprise attack. Just like nobody could have imagined a terrorist attack like 9/11.


http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/01/04/russia.rocket.ap/index.html

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colorado (AP) -- A spent Russian booster rocket re-entered the atmosphere Thursday over Colorado and Wyoming, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said.

NORAD spokesman Sean Kelly said the agency was trying to confirm a report that a piece of the rocket may have hit the ground near Riverton, Wyoming, at about 6 a.m.

Kelly said military personnel had not yet reached the scene.

and their bs missile defense systems.

I feel so safe. Another point for Dubya, the Russians hit the US with a rocket!!!!

Nobody thought it could have been a surprise attack because the object had been tracked from the minute it entered orbit months ago.

Load MIRVs on to boosters which will eventually fall back to earth due to a deteriorating orbit. Or you could simply use the space junk reentering the earth's atmosphere as a mask to launch a real ICBM. Game theory, dictates that their could have been thousands of scenarios this "could" have been. Doncha think they should have at least been placed on alert?

1. How would the MIRVs be steered accurately to their target?
2. How does space junk reentering the atmosphere mask a luanch from the ground? Aren't those two completely different events? Don't you think our radar is capable of telling the difference between something leaving earth over Russia and something approaching the earth over Colorado??
3. Should they be place on alert every time a piece of debris, which has been traced since it entered orbit, come back down? Doesn't that happen every few weeks?

The technology is there. But if you have somebody in the policy chain of command who looks through that data and decides that it is not a threat when it clearly could be a threat then you have a serious problem. This event happens rarely. Most spent rockets fall to earth harmlessly in the ocean and are set up to do so. This one fell very close to the center of the U.S air defense complex. Not to mention F.E. Warren AFB, which houses 50 Peacekeepers, a bastion of the U.S. offensive missile program. The missile that fell to earth still had intact components that hit the ground, most burn up in the atmosphere. Yes, they should have been put on alert. That is what the alert system is for.

Multiple Independently-targetable Re-entry Vehicles. It's a cluster of nuclear warheads that are able to navigate to seperate targets. An ICBM with x number of MIRVs would be able to hit x number of targets that may not be within hundreds of miles of each other.

Now, if I were to put on my :tinfoilhat:, I might be inclined to think that what they could do was slip one of the IRVs onto the old booster, then, as the booster began to seriously go down, seperate the warhead from the booster and let it burn through the atmosphere into a city or something. Once in the air, the IRV can steer itself right where it needs to go.

Everybody has known for weeks about where the spent booster would land. A IRV piggypacked onto the booster could have been in Denver or Jasper in only a couple of minutes, looking like a piece of the booster broken off right until it detonates. :nuke:

Of course, that's only if I put on my :tinfoilhat:.

The problem with this is that we'd pretty quickly put two and two together and nuke the country that launched the booster in the first place. But that does give the enemy a first-strike capability, one that an anti-ballistic-missile system would do squat-all against.

I can even envision a little retro-rocket attached to the IRV, so that on the final orbit for the booster, the warhead could detach, fire the retro-rocket to fall into the atmosphere, and strike a target far from the impact point of the booster. For example, if the final orbit of the booster was over DC on the way to, say, the landing somewhere in Europe or Siberia, the IRV could jump ship over Tennessee and dive down to visit the Pentagon and give it a hot kiss. In this case, we'd know who nuked us, but our command-and-control network would be destroyed and inoperable.

and came down within 200 miles of said prediction

It's kinda like a gentle reminder that we have to play nice with the big boys.

and knew it was no threat.