Comments on: World awaits ballistic-missile takedown over Asia

Japan is on alert to take out a North Korean rocket (which it says is to put a satellite into orbit) with its "Son of Star Wars" SM-3 ballistic missile defense system.

[aj37]

"If loosed, this would be the first time anything of Star War linage has been fired in anger, and not under test conditions."

Isn't the SM-3 what the US Navy used to take out that decaying satellite (the one with the big hydrazine tank that might have made it to the ground) last year? If so, that doesn't seem like "test conditions."

[compbry15]

It also doesn't seem like anger.

[Dalkorian]

Maybe they were quite angry with that failed spy satellite - no, I guess not, they only fired missiles at it.
:D

[Commander_Spock]

Oh heck! Just knew that those "Laser Firing" capable discarded "CONCORDE" may come in for very good uses one day!!!

And, like the OS/2 Powered Russian Federation Rocket Launchers it is hoped that this superb Operating System will be aboard the "Concorde" too. What do you think about this "MOBILE" and Air-To-Air defense system - Houston (NASA)!!!!

Live Long And Prosper!
.

[Dalkorian]

Beam him up, Scotty.

[Commander_Spock]

Huh! Re: "Beam him up, Scotty."

Now, Now, Now "Dalkorian"! Repeat after me: "Father Into Thy Hands I Commit My Soul"

Since after the "White Flash" there may not be enough time to be "Beamed Up"; and, "mobility" has its strategic advantages.

Cheers!

[Commander_Spock]

Re: "Since after the "White Flash" there may not be enough time to be "Beamed Up"; and, "mobility" has its strategic advantages..."

They Are Called "Laser Battle Stars" and those 360' rolls must certainly feel good!

[alegr]

Is it a recession thing? CommSp can't seem to afford the meds anymore.

[ServerMonkey+FarmBoy]

Hitting a satellite in fixed orbit with the trajectory and speed of that satellite at your fingertips is one thing. Hitting a missile fired by someone else, with god knows what capabilities is something completely different. Think of it like Skeet shooting. If you know exactly where the skeet is going, hitting it is relatively simple (if you can aim). If you don't know its exact path, speed, and lift, then tracking it in the heat of the moment can be complicated. If you have a lot of practice it gets easier, but the point was, they haven't practiced without having access to specific details of the flight of the object in question.

I could almost see this missile going "awry" on purpose simply to test the missile defense system. It wouldn't be too terribly difficult to stage some malfunction that would force them to shoot at it without it looking like a deliberate attack. That would give them the information that need to either be afraid, or to not worry about it at all.

[NouberNou]

Why even stage a malfunction? If it even begins a tilt to the south east they could easily claim that was enough of a risk.

Did anyone mention that if its a satellite, nK could easily claim its destruction as an act of war? Very dangerous game of brinkmanship here.

[Randomletters1]

It's interesting to see these Cold War-esque scenarios playing out with other countries as the principals. I wouldn't say that it's exciting, as I'd prefer that international relations stay as boring as possible, but it does make for a good read/monitor.

[Commander_Spock]

Re: "malfunction/s"... can and do occur - they can be caused by computational and other errors (see the attached articles):

Re: "The Explosion of the Ariane 5"

"On June 4, 1996 an unmanned Ariane 5 rocket launched by the European Space Agency exploded just forty seconds after its lift-off rom Kourou, French Guiana. Ariane explosion The rocket was on its first voyage, after a decade of development costing $7 billion. The destroyed rocket and its cargo were valued at $500 million. A board of inquiry investigated the causes of the explosion and in two weeks issued a report. It turned out that the cause of the failure was a software error in the inertial reference system. Specifically a 64 bit floating point number relating to the horizontal velocity of the rocket with respect to the platform was converted to a 16 bit signed integer. The number was larger than 32,767, the largest integer storeable in a 16 bit signed integer, and thus the conversion failed...."

http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane.html

Also, Re: "The Patriot Missile Failure"

"On February 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, an American Patriot Missile battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The Scud struck an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around 100 other people. Patriot missile A report of the General Accounting office, GAO/IMTEC-92-26, entitled Patriot Missile Defense: Software Problem Led to System Failure at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia reported on the cause of the failure. It turns out that the cause was an inaccurate calculation of the time since boot due to computer arithmetic errors. Specifically, the time in tenths of second as measured by the system's internal clock was multiplied by 1/10 to produce the time in seconds. This calculation was performed using a 24 bit fixed point register. In particular, the value 1/10, which has a non-terminating binary expansion, was chopped at 24 bits after the radix point. The small chopping error, when multiplied by the large number giving the time in tenths of a second, led to a significant error. Indeed, the Patriot battery had been up around 100 hours, and an easy calculation shows that the resulting time error due to the magnified chopping error was about 0.34 seconds. (The number 1/10 equals 1/24+1/25+1/28+1/29+1/212+1/213+.... In other words, the binary expansion of 1/10 is 0.0001100110011001100110011001100.... Now the 24 bit register in the Patriot stored instead 0.00011001100110011001100 introducing an error of 0.0000000000000000000000011001100... binary, or about 0.000000095 decimal. Multiplying by the number of tenths of a second in 100 hours gives 0.000000095×100×60×60×10=0.34.) A Scud travels at about 1,676 meters per second, and so travels more than half a kilometer in this time. This was far enough that the incoming Scud was outside the "range gate" that the Patriot tracked. Ironically, the fact that the bad time calculation had been improved in some parts of the code, but not all, contributed to the problem, since it meant that the inaccuracies did not cancel...."

http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/patriot.html

So, there!