Vic Socotra

15 February 2009

Post Script

(Iridium Orbital Scheme)

It a lovely chill Sunday. It is illuminated by the realization that nothing must happen this early in the morning, and tinged with the mild melancholia that the next time the alarm rings it will be Monday again. That is what makes the Sunday morning so sweet for those of us who have something approaching a normal schedule.

There are those who are working now. The NTSB team up in Clarence Center, investigators are confronting the grim task of evaluating the crash site six miles from the Buffalo Airport. Not much is recognizable of was a the Dash-8 turboprop, though the folks who deployed from the Disaster Mortuary Assistance Team of the Public Health Service will do their best to sort the human wreckage.

Unlike their compatriots in the Disaster Medical Assistance Teams (DMATs), there is only expediency in their arrival. I have a deep respect for both, since they are all-volunteer organizations who drop their private lives to rush to the site of disaster.

The DMORTs have a sad poignancy. They reported, ultimately, to the Department of Health and Human Services when I worked in the Emergency Response Office, and I respect them a lot for what they have to do.

There are others who are working this weekend. That includes all the first responders, out there, and the ships at sea and people in the field. It also includes those that watch the heavens on our behalf.

I find myself with a few loose ends to clear up from the Space Junk saga, and want to clear the decks for the week to come. We are going to nationalize the banks, and throw the venerable Chrysler Corporation and possibly General Motors out of business, and it should be great fun.

First off, an alert reader in Tennessee demanded to know why the Iridium satellite, which was active and presumably still had propulsion remaining on board to maneuver, had not been moved out of the way of the dead Cosmos 2251.

No one informed Integral Systems Inc., of Bethesda, Maryland, about the impending intercept course. The company operates the ground support system for Iridium LLC, and the first it knew of the problem was when control was lost.

The entity responsible for such warning, ultimately, is the US Strategic Command, which oversees the US Space Surveillance System. There was no report from them, and besides, it has no operational capability to do much of anything except issue warnings.

The occasional Star Wars tests notwithstanding, there is no operational capability against orbital targets with the exception of the US Navy’s Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System based on U.S. cruisers and destroyers, utilizing the modified SM-3 missile. The successful intercept of a crippled reconnaissance satellite last year resulted in no residual orbital debris. The satellite was coming down anyway, and the point of the evolution- the public one, anyway- was to ensure that toxic fuel onboard the vehicle did not strike inhabited land.

NASA has chief scientist responsible for monitoring orbital debris at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. In priority, the mission focus is protection of manned space activities and secondly other NASA activities.

There is also a private concern named Socrates, which provides a web-based daily risk assessment for potential collisions The Iridium constellation, with 65 satellites, is frequently is on the, but was not on it that day. In any event, the constant maneuvering of the satellites would rapidly deplete their on-board fuel capacity, and diminish mean mission duration.

The Iridium spacecraft are in orbits tilted 86.4 degrees to the equator at an altitude of about 485 miles. The International Space Station is much lower, orbiting Earth at an altitude of about 215 miles at an inclination tilted 51.6 degrees to the equator, so there should be no problem if you intend to visit.

Approximately 600 new projectiles large enough to track have resulted from the collision, orbiting between 500 and 1300 miles above the earth. Most of them will return to ground over the next twenty years, though some will remain up there for 10,000 years.

Scientists say there is not much point losing sleep about things crashing into your house. That is the same shelf-life as the debris cloud from the Chinese missile intercept of the Feng Yun 1C polar-orbit weather satellite.

Estimates of significant debris from that incident range between 40,000 and 300,000 objects.

With bold space plans from a new collection of space-faring nations, the proliferation of junk will only continue to increase, and regrettably, “what goes up” does not necessarily come down for a long time. There are no orbital vacuum cleaners.

Finally, the Ombudsman at the Daily Socotra received a communication from an Alert Reader in California yesterday.

The Ombudsman is a pain in the butt, but is retained on staff for liability reasons. He reported that the writer- a known attorney- communicated with some urgency, saying: “I thought the fact that Cheney made the remark to taciturn, mild-mannered Sen. Pat Leahy, (which) made the salty epithet all the more offensive.”

I told the Ombudsman that I was committed to good taste, which is why I didn’t use the exact words, but I was committed to correcting the public record in the rare occasions when my wild assertions are proven wrong. I explained that I was moving too fast on that one; near orbital speed. Indeed, I conceded, the former Vice President famously did tell Sen. Leahy, not Sen. Dodd, to do something biologically unlikely, if not physically impossible.

To get the Ombudsman off my back, I said I would publish a correction, which since all the people concerned are attorneys except me, is probably the prudent thing to do.

I did point out that there is no conclusive proof that the former Vice President didn’t have the same admonition for the Senior Senator from Connecticut. He said it to just about everyone here in town at one time or another.

I have also wanted to say that to Mr. Dodd, who I don't know, and Mr. Franks, for that matter, though the last time I saw the Honorable Gentleman was when I dined adjacent to him on the sidewalk café at Les Halles on Pennsylvania Ave. I left him alone.

The Daily Socotra is committed to civility above bitter partisanship, after all.

But I would like to tell Mr. Cheney that I will not forgive him for his role in getting us in this mess. I last talked to him in 2003, and was respectful. The way things work here, I doubt if I will have the chance again to be honest.

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