The “deadly” hydrazine gave our guys the excuse for the shot. The shot was to one-up the Chinese in a big way.They knocked down a satellite by bring another satellite to it and making a convergence collision of two satellites in nearby orbits going the same direction at slow relative speed. We just showed China, and anyone else who might be interested that we can hit a very fast bullet with a bullet. That is different by a whole order of magnitude. Not only that, we publicized the shot before we made it. That showed that we were extremely confident that it would be a success i.e. we have a functioning, consistent, and effective ABM. China crawled to a position of being able to take out a satellite by careful maneuvering. We leaped way out in front of China with this. Hey you guys, don’t embarrass yourselves by tying to knock out Taiwan with a blizzard of missiles. And Iran, you pay attention here, too.
Very cool summary. Never heard this put so well.
Good points Art. No doubt it was an order of mag ^ demo shot over China’s capability.
But to play devil’s advocate: we had days to weeks to set up this shot on a bus-sized sat with a known orbit etc.
That is a far cry from a “functioning, consistent, and effective ABM”. It’s a big step toward it, but htting a bus-sized sat in a known orbit, with weeks to prepare, is not the same as shooting down a meter-long warhead with bare minutes of warning time.