Football, sir?
Yes. It’s a sport where you throw a ball with your hands.
So in *football* there is no kicking?
There’s a little kicking. You kick the ball to get points.
How many points, sir?
Sometimes one and sometimes three.
Multiply that by 12 to get inches. Multiple that by 4 to get quarter inches. Or divide. Or something. Screw it, just ask Siri. Don't you people have phones? ^/s
>YOU'RE NOT GOING TO HAVE A CALCULATOR IN YOUR POCKET AT ALL TIMES WHEN YOU GROW UP!
-Math teacher in the 1990s.
Me in 2024: has networked supercomputer with access to AI and all knowledge ever gathered in human history in my pocket at all times.
That first three percent has a lot of air to punch through and a 500knot boost in speed is nothing to sneeze at either.
(I picked 500 knots because I do not know the vertical climb limit of an Eagle at 38000 ft)
Edit: turns out the launch is at the transonic speed of 533 knots at that altitude according to https://web.archive.org/web/20031218130538/http://www.edwards.af.mil/moments/docs_html/85-09-13.html. 616mph.
that's a good point. i did an exhaustive 5 minutes if googling and found [this article](https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/tag/world-record-for-time-to-climb-to-a-height-of-30000-meters/) which shows the f15 rising from 32k feet to 37k feet in 95 seconds, which would seem to suggest a climb rate of 52.6 feet/sec, or around 31 knots, unless my math is off, which it probably is.
Haha, sorry for the confusion. I'm not very familiar with the imperial system. As a metric user, it's standard to convert to the next larger unit, so I guess I've mixed some things up.
Yup, airliners cruise between 30,000 and 40,000 feet. The air is already very thin at that altitude. The missile must have had enough delta-v to reach the trajectory and intercept the satellite. It's pretty amazing when you consider the speeds at which these objects fly and how small they are.
If I had to guess, that was probably the max airspeed for that climb angle so they release the rocket with the highest kinetic energy.
The F-15 publicly goes to FL650 and probably way higher unofficially, but the kinetic energy in relative air speed would be lower at those high altitudes.
Got the missile to the altitude and angle it needed. ASAT is a big missile, the Eagle basically gave a multi-stage SAM a free ride through 38k feet of thick air and then let it go.
hahaha imperial units not your jam? Or were you hoping to get the value in miles? OK sure then we have
38000 feet * 1 mile/5280 feet = 7.2 miles
in metric that's 11.5 km and 555 km. Any other unit conversions I can do for you today?
This right here is why the imperial system sucks: length is length.
You should be able to easily compare different *values* of length, even at different scales. In metric this is stupid easy.
In imperial, when you start thinking that feet and miles are different things, well... You made that bed.
> “Maybe three to five seconds later, as I’m turning in to re-execute the attack from a different azimuth, the bomb — we’re so close, you can see the resolution very well — you could see it hit the helicopter,” Bennett said. “We had delayed fuzes on those things, so that when we hit a Scud or a Scud site, it would penetrate and then blow up. I think we had a 0.25-second delay on the bombs. So, really the bomb blew up right below the helicopter as it went through it. There weren’t even little pieces of it. It was a great hit.”
Fucking lawn darted the chopper.
Also: guns would have been easier, no? Is there not a cannon on that airframe? or maybe it wasn't deemed worth the ammo weight for that mission.
F-15E is armed with a 20mm M61A1 cannon but since they were attacking a ground target (the helicopter had landed), they chose a weapon best suited for the task, and it was luck that when the Hind took off, it flew towards them and the bomb could still hit it - it can't veer off its course much.
[Using guns on a slow flying aircraft with a fast jet is something the US has had bad experiences with.](https://militarymatters.online/military-history/the-time-a-biplane-shot-down-a-modern-jet-fighter-reality-behind-the-story/)
F-15 has a 2° up cant to its gun for dogfighting. That makes strafing runs harder because you have a steeper attack angle. If it's on the ground, bomb it.
Took out a Soviet RORSAT. The first attempt scorched hell out of her bird when the cracked solid propellant exploded rather than burned down, like it was supposed to.
FIXEDIT is doing an amazing DCS/Cold Waters video drama series to go with the audiobook
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVjdFBZCRQc&list=PLxpgm7y5A3_k9s491juhph21h0O_yk79n
Damn, well saves me from bringing it up. But I love that scene. Especially when she says "It might look like a little puff of smoke from way down here, but when one of those things blows it self to hell right under your cockpit its a little more exciting".
Great story.
Also, when the test was performed in 1985, there were around 388 satellites in orbit around Earth (that includes more than LEO).
Today there are over 8,300 in LEO alone.
To be fair, when you say it like that ‚*in LEO alone.*‘ it makes it sound as if that’s only a fraction of all satellites. In truth it’s the vast majority, about 70-75%.
> This breakup likely happen because the satellite's passivation was not performed properly or performed at all. The use of an anti-satellite weapon is not in question since nothing of the sort was detected by any American or European assets
i explicitly used very vague language here to indicate that it's a wild guess. and i'm far away from having any credibility or expertise on those subjects. as u/wggn said, nasa and esa tend to the the explanation with the decaying orbit and the COPV burst. but they also indentified Cosmoos 2576 as an potential ASAT. so if the orbits intercepted it could have been an ASAT usage, i guess, but i dont know.
Hunt for Red October is a close second to me. As a German I might be a bit biased, but this WW3 wargaming just has so many interesting aspects and I really like how he manages to write a story with so many characters and places with action going on in all of them at the same time. Literally a book where I can't stop reading.
Interesting, for me The Bear and the Dragon is the worst Clancy book. Yes, the war is interesting, but it only starts after 500 pages of a bad sex fanfic ("Japanese sausage") and domestic politics bullshit of the day ("abortion bad"). Jack Ryan feels very shallow in this book and I had the impression there was no editor brave enough to tell Clancy to cut through the bullshit and reduce the first 500 pages to 100.
AMRAAMs and most air to air intercept missiles aren't that large. They have to be carried up there and that takes a lot of energy.
The real flying telephone poles are the SAMs, especially the high altitude ones.
Funny enough, the AIM-7 is an entire inch wider than the AIM-120 and 154lb heavier. Of course it's max wingspan is longer, but both missiles are 12ft long.
I want to say it was another F15. It was a long time ago and I don’t remember the story exactly. My dad helped work on the satellite killer missle too.
By chance are you talking about the SM-3? If so I was a VLS tech on one of the first east coast BMD capable ships. That missile is a fucking beast btw.
The Air Force only did it once. The Navy did it once too, when the USS Lake Erie shot down a satellite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost
I wonder to what extent that was just to safeguard life from the hydrzine aboard vs. To test a more operationaly flexible anti-sat weapon to be honest. It would theoretically be easier to plan an ASAT mission with a ship launched weapon than coordinating the takeoff time, launch time, A2AR assets for the mission, etc. Vs. Put a missile on a ship and wait for the satellite to pass over.
Wasn’t there an insane limit-pushing in this? Like the plane going as fast and high as it could to give the missile as much boost as possible, so that it could reach the satellite?
When it was launched, it was at about 11 kilometers up, which is not that limit pushing at all. That's your average flight altitude in an airliner. The speed wasn't that high either at sub mach one. What's unique about this mission is that it was the first ever satellite destroyed by an aircraft.
You're omitting the part where they're doing Mach 0.9 in a 65 degree climb while already at 38,000ft and gaining another \~800ft every second.
I wouldn't imagine that kind of maneuver is very common for fighters either.
An F-22 has the raw power but not the hard point. They were not around at the time of course.
A Foxbat or Foxhound could almost certainly do it. The Foxbat for a short period. The MiG-31 has some giant engines.
F-15 has about a 65,000 ceiling and Mach 2.5 top speed. So FL 380 @ 0.9 seems well below the limits. I'm sure that was all optimized though and for whatever reason this launch height/speed was the best option
The missile was obviously going to be doing all the heavy lifting, but they needed it to be at thiner air to give it the best possible range. Iirc the F-15 was straped from several things to reduce its weight, like removing the gun.
Launching from 50,000 would probably save 15% propellant and launching at Mach 1 would probably save another 15%. That may have allowed a conventional missile to make the target more easily
Can you imagine for a second, being that pilot, staring, essentially into the infinite expand of space..a view few humans have or ever will see…and you shoot a fucking missile towards it 😂😂😂
> I thought it was fictitious, Guess not.
When _The Hunt for Red October_ was published, the US Navy and CIA found themselves wondering how Clancy was able to write so much accurate detail. They thought he had an inside source. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/hunt-for-red-october-tom-clancy-sean-connery-alec-baldwin/
> Tom Clancy had no military experience. He was, in fact, an insurance salesman. There were questions about his insider knowledge of hi-tech naval warfare. Claims that he had intelligence connections were “a lot of crap,” said Clancy. Clancy explained that he’d studied technical manuals and books – light reading such as The World’s Missile Systems and the Guide to the Soviet Navy. He also interviewed submariners and learned from a naval strategy game called Harpoon, which was used to train Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadets. He was, ultimately, a naval warfare geek.
> Ronald Reagan received The Hunt for Red October as a Christmas gift. The president apparently told friends that he was losing sleep over it – because he couldn’t stop reading the novel. Though, as rumoured by Time back in 1985, Reagan did wonder: “How in the world did [Clancy] have all this knowledge?”
> The first and only USAF pilot to shoot down a satellite
*that we know of*.
It wouldn't surprise me if it's happened other times that just haven't become public knowledge.
Space debris is tracked in publicly available databases, we would have noticed if a satellite suddenly turned into a giant debris cloud for no discernible reason.
I was there and back at my home base we had 5 F-15's designated as satellite killers, they were sterile no markings except small tail #'s about 2 inches high on the tail and pilot's name stenciled on cockpit area bad ass baby. I was in charge of getting parts for those birds yes I was Eagle Keeper
one problem, this arms test spread a debris cloud that *almost* destroyed half of all GPS satellites and to this day is causing trouble
the Russians tested a similar system not *that* long ago and that one had the same effect
doing this to the much larger ISS could have very serious consequences so it's much safer to just dismantle it and dump it into the ocean where we can then get the wrecked parts safely with a boat
They spent a good bit of time highlighting this event on the F15 episode of Air Warriors.
https://youtu.be/l0rlIg0IZWU?si=ivoB27uF3q6MXQvK
Go to the 31 minute mark.
How high up is that?
38.000 feet. Satellite was in orbit at 345 miles edit: typo, 345 miles should be 1.138.000 feet sorry :)
so 1.300.000 feet. Feet and miles is so bad to compare as a metric enjoyer
5,280 feet per mile what’s so hard about that? /joke
How many yards to a mile? Nobody knows.
You asked about temperature.
Football, sir? Yes. It’s a sport where you throw a ball with your hands. So in *football* there is no kicking? There’s a little kicking. You kick the ball to get points. How many points, sir? Sometimes one and sometimes three.
....I could throw a football over those mountains
If coach woulda put me in fourth quarter we woulda been state champions
I did not
1760, just 16 away from perfection
We call that a patriot mile
Give that extra 1% for Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam
Mile to yards = 1776 - a pint of lager
1760. Standing gun mount watch in the Navy, we have to call yards to targets. Its ingrained in me
1760. I'm old
How many is that per hour?
Multiply that by 12 to get inches. Multiple that by 4 to get quarter inches. Or divide. Or something. Screw it, just ask Siri. Don't you people have phones? ^/s
>YOU'RE NOT GOING TO HAVE A CALCULATOR IN YOUR POCKET AT ALL TIMES WHEN YOU GROW UP! -Math teacher in the 1990s. Me in 2024: has networked supercomputer with access to AI and all knowledge ever gathered in human history in my pocket at all times.
[удалено]
That's what makes it a vegetable right?
I mean 5,280 feet per mile has to be how fast this jet has to fly to hit the satellite, right?
Not to brag, but I, too, can run 5,280 feet per mile. AMA.
That's approx. 18,900 corn dogs per county fair.
Can I get that in murders per carnie-drifter?
"Five tomatoes." 5280.
Tried that but ended up with a mile being 5,200,000,000 feet.
That's my sell price for GME
how many elbows is that?
How many yards is that? *No one knows.*
38,000 feet is approximately 3% of 345 miles. may as well have launched the missile from the ground at that point. edit: word
That first three percent has a lot of air to punch through and a 500knot boost in speed is nothing to sneeze at either. (I picked 500 knots because I do not know the vertical climb limit of an Eagle at 38000 ft) Edit: turns out the launch is at the transonic speed of 533 knots at that altitude according to https://web.archive.org/web/20031218130538/http://www.edwards.af.mil/moments/docs_html/85-09-13.html. 616mph.
that's a good point. i did an exhaustive 5 minutes if googling and found [this article](https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/tag/world-record-for-time-to-climb-to-a-height-of-30000-meters/) which shows the f15 rising from 32k feet to 37k feet in 95 seconds, which would seem to suggest a climb rate of 52.6 feet/sec, or around 31 knots, unless my math is off, which it probably is.
Five minutes of Google? Man your dedication is inspiring! 😂 All good. We are all just adding to the conversation.
The thing is you have to be more or less under the satellite you're trying to intercept, air launch gives you flexibility.
The satellite was already launched though.
whoops. I meant to say "launch the *missile*", not satellite
I figured, just felt like joshing you.
I love a good joshing
Someone does not speak rocket science
What? You don't like measuring things in feet, cups, spoons, and butts?
Haha, sorry for the confusion. I'm not very familiar with the imperial system. As a metric user, it's standard to convert to the next larger unit, so I guess I've mixed some things up.
I just watched a video about this. I thought it was way higher than 38K. Isn’t that close to what commercial airliners fly at?
The missile was automatically launched at 38,100 while the F-15 was flying at Mach 0.93 executing a 65 degree climb.
The computers and rocket motor did most of the work. Pilot had the best seat in the house, tho.
Yup, airliners cruise between 30,000 and 40,000 feet. The air is already very thin at that altitude. The missile must have had enough delta-v to reach the trajectory and intercept the satellite. It's pretty amazing when you consider the speeds at which these objects fly and how small they are.
If I had to guess, that was probably the max airspeed for that climb angle so they release the rocket with the highest kinetic energy. The F-15 publicly goes to FL650 and probably way higher unofficially, but the kinetic energy in relative air speed would be lower at those high altitudes.
Got the missile to the altitude and angle it needed. ASAT is a big missile, the Eagle basically gave a multi-stage SAM a free ride through 38k feet of thick air and then let it go.
38,000 feet is roughly 7.2 miles. That means that missile went about 338 miles.
Why would you write a comparison in different values?
345 miles * 5280 feet/mile = 1.8e6 feet. There ya go.
The only way to make it worse
hahaha imperial units not your jam? Or were you hoping to get the value in miles? OK sure then we have 38000 feet * 1 mile/5280 feet = 7.2 miles in metric that's 11.5 km and 555 km. Any other unit conversions I can do for you today?
My man
This right here is why the imperial system sucks: length is length. You should be able to easily compare different *values* of length, even at different scales. In metric this is stupid easy. In imperial, when you start thinking that feet and miles are different things, well... You made that bed.
F-15 power. Only plane to shoot down a satellite and to take down a helicopter with a bomb.
Story?
https://taskandpurpose.com/history/air-force-f-15-gulf-war-bomb-iraqi-helicopter/
> “Maybe three to five seconds later, as I’m turning in to re-execute the attack from a different azimuth, the bomb — we’re so close, you can see the resolution very well — you could see it hit the helicopter,” Bennett said. “We had delayed fuzes on those things, so that when we hit a Scud or a Scud site, it would penetrate and then blow up. I think we had a 0.25-second delay on the bombs. So, really the bomb blew up right below the helicopter as it went through it. There weren’t even little pieces of it. It was a great hit.” Fucking lawn darted the chopper. Also: guns would have been easier, no? Is there not a cannon on that airframe? or maybe it wasn't deemed worth the ammo weight for that mission.
F-15E is armed with a 20mm M61A1 cannon but since they were attacking a ground target (the helicopter had landed), they chose a weapon best suited for the task, and it was luck that when the Hind took off, it flew towards them and the bomb could still hit it - it can't veer off its course much.
[Using guns on a slow flying aircraft with a fast jet is something the US has had bad experiences with.](https://militarymatters.online/military-history/the-time-a-biplane-shot-down-a-modern-jet-fighter-reality-behind-the-story/)
F-15 has a 2° up cant to its gun for dogfighting. That makes strafing runs harder because you have a steeper attack angle. If it's on the ground, bomb it.
Just strafe inverted, duh.
All F-15's have 20mm so do F-16's F-22 and others
Getting at gun range to take out the hellicopter means the jet is also at gun range of helicopter
Perfectly fitting DCS clip: https://youtu.be/2pztWq7VlIc?si=zq2bB8H3C-CtpAAl
"104 and 0, look out below! Took out a satellite, just for show." :-p
Let the kid EAT!!!!!
Would you intercept me? I’d intercept me.
Yes, but did it shoot down a balloon?
Reminds me of Red Storm Rising and that Eagle doing sat-killer missions
That’s Major Amy “Buns” Nakamura to you, pal. (Man, I love that book.)
I re-read it a few months back. Still quite prescient with regards to Ukraine
Yeah, Maj. Kelly Nakamura.
Buns
Cams here to make sure!
Took out a Soviet RORSAT. The first attempt scorched hell out of her bird when the cracked solid propellant exploded rather than burned down, like it was supposed to.
two RORSATs. the first intercept was successful and uneventful, the second missile exploded, and the third was successful
Didn't she make ace? Three of those returning Badgers and two reconsats, right?
Yep. And I was corrected, her name was Amy Nakamura.
Amy*
Whomever! I'm surprised I got as much right as I did
Need to finish that book
I need to read it again.
FIXEDIT is doing an amazing DCS/Cold Waters video drama series to go with the audiobook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVjdFBZCRQc&list=PLxpgm7y5A3_k9s491juhph21h0O_yk79n
Damn, well saves me from bringing it up. But I love that scene. Especially when she says "It might look like a little puff of smoke from way down here, but when one of those things blows it self to hell right under your cockpit its a little more exciting". Great story.
Before we started caring about orbital debris. The last tracked piece of debris from this event deorbited 19 years later.
People totally cared about it, that is why the demonstration was done once to show it worked. Chinese did the same in 1995.
Also, when the test was performed in 1985, there were around 388 satellites in orbit around Earth (that includes more than LEO). Today there are over 8,300 in LEO alone.
To be fair, when you say it like that ‚*in LEO alone.*‘ it makes it sound as if that’s only a fraction of all satellites. In truth it’s the vast majority, about 70-75%.
Technically you can make 75% into a fraction, ³/4 I believe.
Well I chuckled.
this is like the people who reply decimation means 10% and not whatever we all colloquially know it to refer to
Do you mean desemenated
technically, it's the exact same number
¾
> Today there are over 8,300 in LEO alone. And over 6000 of them are Starlink satellites.
Plus 2007 and 2009.
and the russians in '21. and it kinda seems like they did it again a few days ago to RESURS-P1 using Cosmos 2576 Oo
> This breakup likely happen because the satellite's passivation was not performed properly or performed at all. The use of an anti-satellite weapon is not in question since nothing of the sort was detected by any American or European assets
[удалено]
i explicitly used very vague language here to indicate that it's a wild guess. and i'm far away from having any credibility or expertise on those subjects. as u/wggn said, nasa and esa tend to the the explanation with the decaying orbit and the COPV burst. but they also indentified Cosmoos 2576 as an potential ASAT. so if the orbits intercepted it could have been an ASAT usage, i guess, but i dont know.
Didn't the Navy shoot one down from a ship a few years back?
Yes, that one was already burning up so it was a good opportunity to run a test without causing extra debris.
No longer content with merely polluting the Earth, humanity has decided to start polluting the rest of the universe too.
As is tradition.
Believe me, you WISH this stuff could escape orbit. Its a lot worse than that
"The rest of the universe".... what? We pollute ourselves and this planet. Beyond that... not hurting anything beyond our atmosphere.
I read your username while drinking a diet soda and gagged.
Major Nakamura, the first Space Ace.
Red Storm rising 😉
By far the best Clancy book.
Rainbow Six & Red Storm Rising are so damn good.
Not even Hunt for Red October?
Hunt for Red October is a close second to me. As a German I might be a bit biased, but this WW3 wargaming just has so many interesting aspects and I really like how he manages to write a story with so many characters and places with action going on in all of them at the same time. Literally a book where I can't stop reading.
*Ryan—be careful what you shoot at, hm? Most things in here don’t react too well to bullets.*
I'm a bit partial to The Bear and the Dragon for similar reasons. Just that epic war feel.
Interesting, for me The Bear and the Dragon is the worst Clancy book. Yes, the war is interesting, but it only starts after 500 pages of a bad sex fanfic ("Japanese sausage") and domestic politics bullshit of the day ("abortion bad"). Jack Ryan feels very shallow in this book and I had the impression there was no editor brave enough to tell Clancy to cut through the bullshit and reduce the first 500 pages to 100.
the old soviet WWII sniper with the gold wolf pelts coming out of retirement was pretty cool moment
“Buns”
Literally clicked this just to see how long it was till RSR
“Buns” Nakamura
Nah. that honnor goes to Arnold Rimmer.
What sort of victory marking did the pilot get to paint on his aircraft after this? A stylized Sputnik would be pretty cool...
I want to see the F22’s balloon kill marking.
[People have already faked one up](https://taskandpurpose.com/culture/chinese-spy-balloon-f-22-raptor-victory-marking-photo-fake/)
Such a huge missile to lob upward…thing was twice as heavy as a phoenix, and six feet longer.
I've heard AMRAAMs described as flying telephone poles before if that's any comparison.
ASM-135 weighed about 2000lbs more than a 120, and was about six feet longer.
AMRAAMs and most air to air intercept missiles aren't that large. They have to be carried up there and that takes a lot of energy. The real flying telephone poles are the SAMs, especially the high altitude ones.
Funny enough, the AIM-7 is an entire inch wider than the AIM-120 and 154lb heavier. Of course it's max wingspan is longer, but both missiles are 12ft long.
"Hello boys! I'm baaaaaaacccck!"
Hell of a day to quit drinking
Right idea wrong airframe though
I'm no expert, but I don't think a crop duster can fly that high
Okay nerd.
Yeah, no aviation nerds on r/aviation!
Yea looks like an f15 rather than an f18
[How could we forget this hero??](https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.1331786051.4395/st,small,845x845-pad,1000x1000,f8f8f8.jpg)
My dad was in the chase plane that took that photo. It’s been hanging in his den for 40 years.
Legendary
That's awesome.
That's damn cool. What did they use for a chase plane? Just curious.
Just a Cessna
I want to say it was another F15. It was a long time ago and I don’t remember the story exactly. My dad helped work on the satellite killer missle too.
By chance are you talking about the SM-3? If so I was a VLS tech on one of the first east coast BMD capable ships. That missile is a fucking beast btw.
Not sure. I’ll have to ask him.
Bro you can have my upvote but don't change your dad
Doug Pearson at the helm
Have we really only done that once?
The Air Force only did it once. The Navy did it once too, when the USS Lake Erie shot down a satellite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost
I wonder to what extent that was just to safeguard life from the hydrzine aboard vs. To test a more operationaly flexible anti-sat weapon to be honest. It would theoretically be easier to plan an ASAT mission with a ship launched weapon than coordinating the takeoff time, launch time, A2AR assets for the mission, etc. Vs. Put a missile on a ship and wait for the satellite to pass over.
Doing it multiple times would be a very foolish idea given the amount of debris it creates in orbit
Wasn’t there an insane limit-pushing in this? Like the plane going as fast and high as it could to give the missile as much boost as possible, so that it could reach the satellite?
When it was launched, it was at about 11 kilometers up, which is not that limit pushing at all. That's your average flight altitude in an airliner. The speed wasn't that high either at sub mach one. What's unique about this mission is that it was the first ever satellite destroyed by an aircraft.
You're omitting the part where they're doing Mach 0.9 in a 65 degree climb while already at 38,000ft and gaining another \~800ft every second. I wouldn't imagine that kind of maneuver is very common for fighters either.
No other aircraft on earth could push Mach 1 at 40k feet towing a giant ass missile at 65°
An F-22 has the raw power but not the hard point. They were not around at the time of course. A Foxbat or Foxhound could almost certainly do it. The Foxbat for a short period. The MiG-31 has some giant engines.
True forgot about the foxbat
I remember wrong, it seems.
F-15 has about a 65,000 ceiling and Mach 2.5 top speed. So FL 380 @ 0.9 seems well below the limits. I'm sure that was all optimized though and for whatever reason this launch height/speed was the best option
The missile was obviously going to be doing all the heavy lifting, but they needed it to be at thiner air to give it the best possible range. Iirc the F-15 was straped from several things to reduce its weight, like removing the gun.
Launching from 50,000 would probably save 15% propellant and launching at Mach 1 would probably save another 15%. That may have allowed a conventional missile to make the target more easily
If only the engineers and scientists had listened to you!
Difference between mach 1 in level flight, and pointing up pretty close to straight up.
Starfighter
Pssh, I did this mission in Ace Combat 3. Nbd
So we gonna act like the fast and furious movies are cannon?? Come on now we better than this.
Hi Buns!
I got that reference. RSR. Good book.
clearly hasnt heard of buns nakamuri
Can you imagine for a second, being that pilot, staring, essentially into the infinite expand of space..a view few humans have or ever will see…and you shoot a fucking missile towards it 😂😂😂
This was featured in a Tom Clancy novel, Red Storm Rising. I thought it was fictitious, Guess not.
> I thought it was fictitious, Guess not. When _The Hunt for Red October_ was published, the US Navy and CIA found themselves wondering how Clancy was able to write so much accurate detail. They thought he had an inside source. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/hunt-for-red-october-tom-clancy-sean-connery-alec-baldwin/ > Tom Clancy had no military experience. He was, in fact, an insurance salesman. There were questions about his insider knowledge of hi-tech naval warfare. Claims that he had intelligence connections were “a lot of crap,” said Clancy. Clancy explained that he’d studied technical manuals and books – light reading such as The World’s Missile Systems and the Guide to the Soviet Navy. He also interviewed submariners and learned from a naval strategy game called Harpoon, which was used to train Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadets. He was, ultimately, a naval warfare geek. > Ronald Reagan received The Hunt for Red October as a Christmas gift. The president apparently told friends that he was losing sleep over it – because he couldn’t stop reading the novel. Though, as rumoured by Time back in 1985, Reagan did wonder: “How in the world did [Clancy] have all this knowledge?”
"Hello Boys, I'm Back!"
that we know of
Look, I'm a tomcat fanboy through and through but the service record of the F-15 is insane.
> The first and only USAF pilot to shoot down a satellite *that we know of*. It wouldn't surprise me if it's happened other times that just haven't become public knowledge.
Space debris is tracked in publicly available databases, we would have noticed if a satellite suddenly turned into a giant debris cloud for no discernible reason.
Yeah it is now
I live right by Edwards AFB, this is a cool piece of history performed by an EAFB plane.
First one so far...
How did they take the picture?
I'd guess from a second F-15
With a camera
Mirrors.
Ace Rimmer strikes again
***SPACE WILL NOT SAVE YOU***
*so far
I was there and back at my home base we had 5 F-15's designated as satellite killers, they were sterile no markings except small tail #'s about 2 inches high on the tail and pilot's name stenciled on cockpit area bad ass baby. I was in charge of getting parts for those birds yes I was Eagle Keeper
would this be cheaper to shoot the ISS down then giving almost a billion dollars to spacex? :D
one problem, this arms test spread a debris cloud that *almost* destroyed half of all GPS satellites and to this day is causing trouble the Russians tested a similar system not *that* long ago and that one had the same effect doing this to the much larger ISS could have very serious consequences so it's much safer to just dismantle it and dump it into the ocean where we can then get the wrecked parts safely with a boat
How fast was the missile going when it intercepted a satellite doing 9km/s or so?
Celestial Eagle has to be the coolest name you could give an F15
Would that be "Buns" Nakamura?
First and only seems a bit redundant, doesn't it? If he's the only one, then he's definitely the first
They spent a good bit of time highlighting this event on the F15 episode of Air Warriors. https://youtu.be/l0rlIg0IZWU?si=ivoB27uF3q6MXQvK Go to the 31 minute mark.
Was the missile an SM-3 ?
No, that was Burnt Frost. This was the ASM-135.
There's a couple of model kits made of this plane. Aptly called satellite killer f15