Spy Satellite the Size of a Bus Coming Home Faster Than Planned

Watch the skies - for the next few weeks there's a small but non-zero chance that nine tons of mysteriously unidentified United States property could fireball into your skull.  And from the way people are talking, it seems like your crushed ashes would be scooped up into an envelope marked "ABOVE TOP SECRET" and interred in a sealed bank vault ten miles below Area 51.

A secret satellite believed to be the size of a bus has apparently lost power, propulsion, and ability to resist the saying about "what goes up".  Satellites have fallen out of the sky before, burning up in the atmosphere, but this one is big enough to survive re-entry  - survive not being a word applicable to anything under it when it arrives. Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the UN Security Council, says that "We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause".  One imagines he was a lawyer in a previous life because that statement contains more qualifications and reservations than a graduation ceremony in a hotel.

Considering that every word about the issue seems to be painfully forced out of the government by the legal liability equivalent of a thumbscrew-equipped waterboard, one has to wonder what goodies this high-velocity prodigal satellite contains.  Hydrazine, a highly unstable and toxic rocket fuel component, is one suspect - a jolly concept since the list of organs the stuff damages reads like an anatomy chart.  If it's a body part and hydrazine doesn't destroy it, you probably didn't need it to begin with.

The most likely explanation for all the secrecy is that it's a spy satellite that got tired of sneaking snaps of the globe and is coming down for an extremely permanent rest.  Internet experts aren't ruling out more esoteric possibilities of it being a secret weapons platform, but that's because internet experts haven't yet ruled out the possibility that Elvis killed JFK, and can be safely discounted.

What you can be sure of is that even the controlled re-entry of human-capable craft gets up past twenty times the speed of sound, and this burning hunk of rocket-fuel filled whatever is going to be coming down faster than that, unhindered by such concerns as "survival of passengers", "survival of cargo" or "survival of anything within a blast radius or two of wherever the hell it hits".  Once its orbital decay becomes more advanced it should be possible to predict where it will hit to within a few miles.

This could all turn out to be academic (but still cinematically awesome if anyone films it), with a seventy percent chance that it'll do nothing but scare the daylights out of a lot of fish.  Even should it strike land the fact is that, outside Hong Kong, most land isn't covered with a solid carpet of people.  The odds of it hitting a major city are almost negligible - but you can be sure that, somewhere, a group of news-network executives are praying to their dark gods that it does.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

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Satellite soon to strike http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7211443.stm

Comments

[Dave]

Great write up Luke

[DZ]

That would be very nice to watch.

[Head Butt The Motha F-word Back to NASA]

So when will the first one be so smart to register http://www.wherewillitland.com and make major bucks out of it with a prediction contest, including Google Earth coordinates? The closest prediction will win then, at least, those who inherit the poor b*stard's money. He'll have no use for it after all, being incinerated an' all.

[Alkhemist]

Does anyone know *when*??

[Mason, Judy]

Wow, Luke McKinney, you missed nothing about the subject of the incoming projectile. Perfectly done - the best writing I've seen on the internet for a long time. Thanks for that!

[stojko]

awesome writing... GJ.