A prophecy from Jeremiah 51 is appropriate for this nation that has turned its back on God Almighty and attempts to go its own way:

Though Babylon should mount up to heaven, and though she should fortify the height of her strength, yet from me shall spoilers come unto her, saith the LORD. (Jeremiah 51:53)


The U.S. Navy shot down a wayward spy satellite orbiting the Earth.

By Josh White and Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 21, 2008

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/21/AR2008022100641.html?hpid=topnews

Military officials have a "high degree of confidence" that they were able to hit and destroy the tank of potentially dangerous fuel aboard a wayward spy satellite orbiting Earth last night, but they said they must still monitor the debris to be certain it does not pose further risk of reentering the atmosphere in coming days.

Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon this morning that there are several indications that the missile intercept 150 miles over the Pacific Ocean was successful, including video evidence of a fireball erupting, a vapor cloud forming around the satellite and spectral imaging of what appears to be the fuel, hydrazine, venting into space.

"The intercept occurred, and we're very confident we hit the satellite," Cartwright said, displaying video clips that show an SM-3 missile launching into space from a Navy cruiser and then impacting the National Reconnaissance Office satellite in a flash of light and debris at about 10:26 p.m. Eastern time. "We also have a high degree of confidence we hit the tank."

SM-3s are part of the Navy's sea-based missile defense system and carry a kinetic warhead, meaning that they are designed to impact a target at great speed in order to obliterate it without explosives. In this case, the missile was aimed at a satellite about the size of a bus and traveling at more than 17,000 mph, with the goal of hitting a fuel tank that carried about 1,000 pounds of frozen hydrazine fuel.

Before last night's intercept, some experts had expressed doubts about the seriousness of the risk posed by the falling satellite and questioned whether the shot was an excuse to perform an anti-satellite test that many people around the world found controversial. Skeptics in the arms-control community have speculated that the administration chose to undertake the shoot-down partly to test missile defense technology.

Cartwright said he is roughly 80 to 90 percent certain that the satellite fuel tank ruptured, and the military has tracked pieces of debris already falling through the Earth's atmosphere above the world's oceans. That debris -- with no piece larger than a football yet detected -- so far has not survived the fall through the atmosphere. Officials expect most if not all of the debris to burn up on its way down to Earth.

Though Cartwright and other defense officials said the effort was not a test of the nation's missile defense system, nor a show of force to other countries that the United States can take down a satellite, the operation made it clear that the missile defense system can be modified very quickly to accomplish such a task. Cartwright said software and equipment modifications were done over the past 30 days to intercept the dead satellite, which was stationed in a predictable orbit but whose behavior could have become unpredictable once it had penetrated Earth's atmosphere on its fall.

The elements of the missile defense system that most came into play were the sensors that tracked the satellite, making an intercept possible. The modifications that allowed the Navy cruiser USS Lake Erie to launch the missile and hit the satellite are not going to enter standard operating procedures within the military, Cartwright said.

"We see this as a one-time event," he said, dismissing skepticism about the reason for the intercept. "This was uncharted territory. The technical degree of difficulty was significant here . . . You can imagine at the point of intercept there were a few cheers that went up in operations centers and on that ship."

In January 2007, China shot down an aged satellite orbiting about 600 miles above Earth and was roundly criticized by the United States and many other nations for doing so. That anti-satellite test created thousands of pieces of debris that will remain potential hazards to orbiting spacecraft for decades.

At a news conference in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao raised concerns about the destruction of the U.S. satellite, the Associated Press reported.

"China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries," Liu said, according to the AP. "China requests the U.S. to fulfill its international obligations in real earnest and provide to the international community necessary information and relevant data in a timely and prompt way so that relevant countries can take precautions."