| Can we have some smelling salts please? McClatchy Media just fainted dead away. |
BUT even as debris from the shattered satellite began raining down over the Pacific Ocean, there were worries that 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, the director of the Washington D.C.-based Center for Defense Information, a centrist national security policy institute. "They'll see it as the weaponization of space."
Hitchens said she believed that both 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."Marine Gen. James Cartwright said there's little the military can learn from the shoot-down that could be applied to missile defense. "It doesn't cross over," he said.
Loren Thompson , a defense analyst at the Washington D.C. area-based Lexington Institute , agreed, noting that most satellites' orbits are too high to be hit by ship-based missiles.