Could U.S. satellite strike boost arms race in space?

WASHINGTON — A U.S. missile strike that appeared Thursday to have shattered a crippled spy satellite and vaporized its hazardous hydrazine fuel sent up cheers among Pentagon planners, who for three weeks had worked to turn an anti-missile system into one that could track and kill an object orbiting the Earth.

But as debris from the shattered satellite began raining down over the Pacific, there were worries the U.S. achievement might spur other nations to advance their own anti-satellite programs and turn outer space into a potential battlefield.

"I don't see how other nations don't see this as an anti-satellite test," said Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, a centrist national-security policy institute. "They'll see it as the weaponization of space."

China, which last year came under harsh U.S. criticism for using a missile to destroy an aged weather satellite hundreds of miles in space, was the first to react.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a statement demanding that the United States share details of the shoot-down, which took place Wednesday night as the satellite passed over the Pacific about 600 miles west of Hawaii. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, on a visit to Hawaii, said the military would provide "appropriate" data to the Chinese.

Russia had no immediate reaction, though Russian President Vladimir Putin warned recently that the U.S. use of its anti-missile system against satellites would bring a response.

Hitchens said she believed China and Russia would use the U.S. destruction of the satellite as reason to step up development of their own anti-satellite weapons. China, she said, is "likely to use this as an excuse to do what they wanted to do already." Russia, she added, "will come down hard on this."

For U.S. military officials, confirmation that the missile probably destroyed the satellite and its hydrazine tank came in two forms.

The first was a video — possibly shot from another satellite, though military officials wouldn't say — that showed the satellite as a small point of light. Suddenly, the light explodes into a fireball and becomes a roiling, expanding cloud that military officials think was the hydrazine vaporizing.

The second was tracking data that indicated that only football-size debris remained from the 5,000-pound, bus-size satellite.

Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said officials had a "high degree of confidence" the missile had fulfilled its mission, which U.S. officials ordered out of concern that the hydrazine fuel tank would survive re-entry and land in a populated area.

It'll be several more days before the military can be certain that the missile struck the tank, Cartwright said. Evidence yet to be reviewed includes video from the missile moments before it struck the satellite, which failed hours after it was lifted into space in December 2006.

The Pentagon had modified three SM-3 missiles to shoot at the out-of-control satellite at a cost of between $30 million and $40 million. Cartwright said the two unused missiles would be reconfigured to their previous condition. Left alone, the satellite was expected to fall to Earth on March 6.

President Bush authorized the shoot-down three weeks ago after the Pentagon and NASA raised concerns about the hydrazine.

Many governments accepted the Bush administration's explanation that the satellite had to be knocked down apart because it was carrying a 1,000-pound tank of potentially hazardous hydrazine rocket fuel. "Obviously, we regret the circumstances, but we understand that these were exceptional circumstances, and we support the decision," said Emmanuel Lenain, spokesperson for the French Embassy.

Geoffrey Forden, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked with colleagues to estimate the probability of the hydrazine harming anyone on Earth, said that if the fuel tank made it through the atmosphere, there was a 3-in-100 chance that it would land within 100 yards of someone on the ground.

He and his colleagues also calculated, however, that there was virtually no chance the tank would have remained intact.

"It certainly would seem that protecting people against a hazardous fuel was not what this was really about," he said.

While the remaining debris is expected to fall out of orbit within two weeks, the debate over the implications of the shoot-down will remain.

"I think they were using the [satellite] threat as cover to do something they have been wanting to do for a long time," said Victoria Samson, a research analyst at the Center for Defense Information, who specializes in missile defense. "It shows that our missile-defense programs are not just missile-defense programs, they're also anti-satellite programs."

Material from The Washington Post is included in this report.