In the predawn darkness of 11 January 2007, a Chinese medium-range ballistic missile lifted off from a launch site at the Xichang space facility in Sichuan province. Fired from a mobile transporter-erector-launcher, the new two-stage, solid-fuelled missile -designated the SC-19 by the US intelligence community -carried a kinetic kill vehicle that slammed several minutes later into an ageing Chinese weather satellite deployed in low Earth orbit at an altitude of some 864 kilometres. Since the satellite, the Fengyun-1C (FY-1C), was heading south at the time of its intercept, and since the azimuth from the interceptor launch point to the target was approximately 346 • , the attack involved a virtual head-on collision at extremely high velocity with thousands of blast fragments ejected at speeds of up to some 2,253km per hour into various orbits ranging from 3,800km to 200km in altitude. 1 As of 30 May 2007, over 1,736 objects of trackable debris, each at least 10cm in diameter, had been catalogued and monitored. And NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office has estimated that the explosion produced more than 35,000 shards larger than 1cm, justifying the judgement that this test was undoubtedly the 'worst single debris event ever' 2 since it instantaneously produced a 10% increase in the 50-year total of space artefacts capable of threatening spacecraft flying in low Earth orbits. 3 This stunning demonstration of anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities was remarkable for other reasons. To begin with, although the event occurred 'under testing conditions that [China] controlled', 4 there is no evidence that Chinese space managers manipulated the flight parameters of the satellite in any way prior to the mission to render it an easier target; rather, the attack was executed on a spacecraft that was flying as fast -7.42km per second -as an intercontinental ballistic missile re-entering the atmosphere. 5 Further, the satellite's destruction
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