CHICOM ASAT test?

Allen Thomson wrote:
"Medium-range ballistic missile"?

DF-21?
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/china/theater/df-21.htm
This might make more sense than the DF-31, which seems a little too
capable for direct ascent LEO intercepts.
I also is mobile.
This is interesting:

"Work is believed to be ongoing to provide this missile with a
sophisticated terminal guidance system. According to some reports the
Mod 2 version of the CSS-5 will be comparable to the US Pershing II
IRBM, employ advanced radar guidance to achieve extremely high accuracy."

Pat

Allen Thomson wrote:
(And I could spend a long time telling you how many times I've heard
well-qualified people dismiss direct ascent HTK ASAT as a threat
because of its extreme technical difficulty -- something only the
superest of superpowers could do. I didn't believe it then, and I don't
believe it now.)


Heck, we were doing tests on this idea back in the 1950s with Nike Zeus'
and Thors with nuclear warheads, and even a had a limited operational
capability with it.
Even our mid 80's air-launched KKV ASAT was a pretty simple and
straightforward program, that went from idea to hardware in quite a
hurry. In twenty years, the Chinese should have been able to match that
technology.
Here's a discussion of the Chinese ASAT possibility from 2002, and
updated in June of 2006:
http://www.cns.miis.edu/pubs/week/020722.htm

Pat

Rand Simberg wrote:
Why not? You don't need a lot of velocity--just altitude and timing.
In fact the article is a little misleading. I'll bet that the
interceptor didn't "slam into" the satellite. I'd bet that the
satellite slammed into the interceptor, with a very high (i.e., almost
orbital) relative velocity...


If it was direct ascent, that's certainly what it did... with good
timing of detonation all your "interceptor" needs to be is a big bucket
of sand with an small explosive charge at its center. You just blow it
up around a second before the satellite arrives and let it fly into a
several hundred foot wide cloud of sand at 18,000 mph. That will screw
it up but good.

Pat

Jake McGuire wrote:

Also, can we figure out the lighting at the time of intercept? Might tell us something about the sensor suite on the KV.


It happened pretty close to 22:25 UT on 11 November 2007, at 860 km
altitude. The lat/lon are somewhat speculative at the moment, but I
think around 40 N, 101 E is a decent guess.

Whether that tells us about the KV sensor suite is uncertain, because
there might have been a desire for optical sensors at Xichan and
Jiuquan to get a look at the intercept as well.

Rand Simberg wrote:
Nope. I wonder what this implies about the difficulty of missile
defense...?


Assuming it doesn't maneuver, the satellite's orbit means its path and
velocity are fixed and can be known in advance to a matter of inches.
With ICBM's you've got to wait till the warheads separate from it, or
hit it on the way up.
If you try to hit it during ascent, you're dealing with a target that's
accelerating, and that makes it harder.
In exoatmospheric flight there's the problem of separating the warheads
from the MIRVs, which is tricky.
During reentry the decoys slow down faster and burn up, but now you are
dealing with incoming warheads that are decelerating, and may engage in
terminal maneuvering, which again raises problems.
The ASAT is a _lot_ easier.
It would be more worrying if China had tried out a co-orbital ASAT like
the Soviets used, as that would be able to attack from just about any
place in a satellite's orbit, rather than just over China or near its
borders.

Pat

On Thu, 18 Jan 2007 16:06:42 -0600, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:



Rand Simberg wrote:
Nope. I wonder what this implies about the difficulty of missile
defense...?


The ASAT is a _lot_ easier.

No one is denying that. The point is that if the critics were wrong
about the difficulty of ASAT, perhaps they're just as wrong (and for
the same reasons) about the difficulty of missile defense.

"Pat Flannery"
Of course, if Oriental cunning is a work here, then this isn't a test of a
operational system, but simply a one-off to freak us out and make us spend
a fortune on developing ways to counter it.

A better target -- freak out the Dems in Congress into signing
away all our space maneuverability, and forcing a treaty that
Clinton-appointed federal judges can enforce at will.

Allen Thomson wrote:
That's a very interesting question, and I hope that the Competent
Organs are going to go back and take a very careful look at PRC rocket
firings over the past several years.



According to CNN on "Lou Dobbs Tonight" they had three unsuccessful
tests prior to getting this one to work.

Pat

According to CNN on "Lou Dobbs Tonight" they had three unsuccessful
tests prior to getting this one to work.


That would be somewhat consistent with the KT-1 hypothesis for what
this booster was.

But I think we're in a stage where we're hearing ourselves in an echo
chamber, and it will take a while to sort out what is signal, what is
echo, what is random noise.

However, this event does seem to have a fair amount of signal,
amazingly enough. Once the dross has been sorted out, I think some
interesting stuff is going to come out.

Jim Oberg wrote:
Allen, do we know which medium range missiles have been tested out of
Xichang?

I.e., what pads do they have there?


According to Encyclopedia Astronautica, only two:
http://www.astronautix.com/sites/xichang.htm
One pad for the CZ-3; and one pad for CZ-2E, CZ-3A, and CZ-3B
Of course they may have other pads we don't know about, as it's a
military base.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/...na/xichang.htm
This is the place that the rocket took off from that fell on the village:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_708

Pat