Bill Bard wrote: > One could make a case that the reason for the launch > uncertainty is to prevent a hijacked aircraft from flying > into the shuttle right at launch. To accomplish this, the > launch time needs to be known sometime in the future to be > able to know which aircraft to hijack so that it's not flying > for hours waiting for a launch to occur. While hitting a > shuttle on the ground would be a major event, hitting a > shuttle right at launch would be much greater, since > television coverage would be plentiful. All that is required to prevent this scenario is to enforce a no-fly radius sufficient to prevent any loitering non-military air craft from catching to, or intercepting, a just-launched shuttle. I suspect that if one were to do the math, this radius would be quite small. Commercial airliners cover about 10 miles per minute. how far does the shuttle travel in its first minute of flight? clearly, there would be no way to cover that distance to catch up to a shuttle in the first seconds after lift-off. A terrorist's only hope would be to loiter somewhere down-range, to force a collision. How long after lift-off does it take the shuttle to reach an altitude, velocity and acceleration to make this scenario impossible? The answer would define the down-range no-fly envelope. My intuition is that the radius would be small, no more than a few miles. I have complete confidence in the ability of NORAD and the U.S. Air Force to enforce such small no-fly zones, i.e. interceptor planes in the air at all times. As others have mentioned, a terrorist with a missile would be much greater cause for concern, but assuming he could get close enough, his best bet would be to attack the shuttle during tanking. Sadly, as I write this, one of the incompetents at INS could be rubber-stamping the visitor's visa for an Al Qaeda person assigned to take out a shuttle. Perhaps NASA should offer any INS person found to have negligently let in a terrorist, a free seat in the flame trench from which to view the next launch. Ted Molczan ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Mar 20 2002 - 10:47:42 EST