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On February 21, 2008, a missile launched from a US Navy cruiser soared 240 km above the Pacific and smashed a dying and potentially deadly US spy satellite, the Pentagon said. Several defence officials claimed it had apparently achieved the primary aim of destroying an onboard tank of toxic fuel. Officials had expressed cautious optimism that the missile would hit the satellite, the size of a school bus. But they were less certain of hitting the smaller, more worrisome fuel tank, whose contents posed what Bush administration officials deemed a potential health hazard to humans if it landed intact.

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Owned by the National Reconnaissance Office, the US spy satellite was launched in December 2006 from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California for testing newly developed sensors for both optical and radar based high resolution imagery.

Owing to failure of onboard software-based control systems, a hurdle that apparently proved insurmountable, control over the satellite was lost and it was consequently declared defunct and abandoned. However, two months ago, it was observed to be moving progressively closer to the Earth and the estimate was that it would ultimately impact some point on it by the first week of March 2008, posing danger to human habitation. As claimed by Pentagon, the decision to destroy the satellite before it entered the Earth’s atmosphere was triggered by the fact that it was carrying in excess of 500 kg of unspent Hydrazine, a potential threat to humans as the impact point of the satellite could neither be predicted nor controlled. The last part of the claim lacks credibility as the US has the capability to track tiny objects on a re-entry trajectory and predict with reasonable degree of accuracy the likely impact area.

During the Cold War era, both the US and the Soviet Union pursued the development of anti-satellite missiles, conducting innumerable successful tests. The first time that a satellite in orbit was successfully destroyed by an anti satellite weapon launched from a USAF F-15 aircraft was in 1985. Testing was, however, discontinued to avoid pollution of space by debris from fragmented satellites.