That's not the Reagan anti-missile program. Hitting an orbiting satellite with a ground launched interceptor isn't terribly difficult. The orbit is known to the nth degree and does not vary by more than a tiny fraction per orbit. That gives them the ability to lock in the flight plan with extreme precision before launch. The Reagan "star-wars" plan was to hit incoming ICBM missiles. That is several orders of magnitude more difficult; requiring advanced tracking to aquire the incoming missiles, determine their precise trajectory, plot an intercept course, launch the interceptor, receive mid-course telemetry, make corrections, and achieve interception. That's a hell of a lot more difficult than just hitting an orbiting satellite with a very well defined orbit. Also, the star-wars interceptor needs to be able to do all that in real-time with only minutes to make calculations before launching. The chinese test could have been planned for months and checked/rechecked a hundred times before launch.

Apples != Oranges

"Look, Maggie! It's Sergeant Thug's Mountaintop Command Post! Complete with "DeathBringer Missiles" that really launch."

/Simpsons oldie

Missions of dollars? Is that a lot?

Yeah, but we still have a Basselope. They dont

I always thought the Russians used a pencil instead...

Iphtashu Fitz: The US had this capability back when JFK was president. My dad worked on it.

Yeah, but ours was launched from a plane in flight. That's more difficult than launching from a ground station. We did one successful test and packed the whole thing in after we made an anti-ASAT weapon promise with the Soviets to get some nuclear reduction/proliferation promises from them.

microsofth8r: NASA is telling us just WHERE and WHEN the Satelites will be

Meh, it's common knowledge. Any nation-state has the ability to track every satellite in orbit and know it's exact position at any given moment in time. It's not like they can hide from view. All you need is three track points to build a complete orbit.

The only way we can "surprise" anyone is to do an delta-v maneuver on a bird to change it's orbit. The new orbit will probably only be a "surprise" for a couple of revs at best before everyone that matters will have noticed it and replotted their orbit tracks (and notified everyone of it).

/// actually certified as a satellite ground ops controller
/// Have patches from 6 birds I have personally flown
/// Awesome group of people to work with
/// NASA came to us for help with one of their birds that was sick; we solved it and rescued it; the press gave NASA the credit

It's all a one-upmanship game. Just like Reagan bankrupted the communists by making them try and keep up with his defense spending, or that's what some try to make us believe.

sidmind: I am no rocket scientist, but it sounds like the way to defeat us in the time of war is to simply knock out all of our GPS satellites. You know the ones that guide our missiles?

I wonder if Washington has ever considered this a problem?

Yes.

Problem is, they (russia, china, et. al.) use it for their own navigation too, so it would hurt them also. Because of it's extensive commercial use, it would also impact world trade and the global economy quite a bit; that hurts everyone with the modern, connected global markets.

Also, we don't use GPS for our sole navigation/targeting method. While it would affect us, it definitely wouldn't stop us.

The only practical way to be 100% sure you will stop a nuclear missile is to set off a nuke in its general vicinity, IMO.

Meh... wake me up when we start talking about linking our defense grids to a single computer controlled point.

Remember Reagan's anti missile defense program that would never work and wased millions of dollars? Well, William Tell shot an apple off his son's head with a single shot from an arrow!

/almost as bad a comparison as the one in the headline