The Satellite Shootdown: Behind the Scenes
A warship's missile hits its target to cheers from the control room
Obliterated
We get something called kinetic warhead, literally images down from space. The last four seconds of the kinetic warhead imagery, you could see it as it got bigger. And the last frame was the last thing the satellite will ever remember. It was pretty big right there on the screen. [The weapons officer] was over by the radar scope, and I was standing right behind him. The radar scope went wild then. It's a very sensitive radar. At that point, there was a lot of debris, a lot of pieces. So we thought we'd had a pretty good impact. That was confirmed by the aircraft that were airborne, the radars ashore, and some other sensors and that it pretty much was obliterated. Over the next three to four hours, quite literally a lot of it burned up as it was coming down, which was the whole goal.
Stressing
There weren't as many modifications done to the missile as to the Aegis weapons system computer program. One of the nice things about the ballistic missile defense arena that the Navy's been able to do since 1999 is rebuild off existing Aegis weapons system technology and existing standard missile technology to grow that into the ballistic missile arena. We started tackling obviously rudimentary threats to start with. In the first few tests, everybody knew when it was happening. It was unitary targets, those of a single body. Then we went after a separating target. And with each successive test, we told less and less people on board about it, and it became a lot more operational in nature. It also became more stressing. Each of the targets and events became more stressing for the weapons system to push it farther and farther.
'As President Reagan envisioned'
Clearly, this one, we pushed it way beyond what we ever thought it was supposed to do, both the Aegis system and the missile. The speed of the target was much faster than a typical ballistic missile, for one. The height that the missile had to travel was quite a bit—well, not that much more, a little bit higher...When you do a ballistic missile, the closing velocity, we try to come in at a little bit of shallow angle. There's no explosive on it, it's clearly a bullet hitting a bullet as President Reagan envisioned a number of years ago. This time it was coming so fast that we shot it basically straight on. Just the sheer impact of that speed in space literally obliterated it.
Contractors
About 35 people on board, a combo of government and technical experts that work on the system all the time, the program verifiers, folks from Lockheed, and folks from Raytheon, which builds the missile. For a typical event, we normally have 15 to 20 on board, so we had a few more. One other thing I would also like to tell you, every time we operate the system since its inception, it's always been Navy sailors operating the consoles. The contractors have never operated the consoles. They didn't this time, either. They were there as more of a double-check, because there were a lot of things in the computer program...they put the patches in on it that opened up some of the parametrics of the weapons system to allow us to track it at that high rate of speed and that kind of altitude. It really was a team effort across the board.
Plan B
We had a second missile on board. I guess the theory always was that plan A was going to work. Plan B would be we would wait for another shot opportunity had it flown by or had we hit it at a bad angle and the tank was still going to survive. There's this talk of we did it for all kinds of different reasons, and it's just simply not true. We did it for the most altruistic reasons known, which is we knocked it out because we didn't want the tank coming back through the atmosphere and potentially falling on populated areas. There'd never been a tank that big full of hydrazine that had ever re-entered the atmosphere, and I'm not a real expert, but from what people tell me, hydrazine's pretty nasty stuff.
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