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Feb 26, 2008 8:09 AM

His Ship Shot the Satellite

U.S. News has an interview with Captain R. M. Hendrickson, commanding officer on the USS Lake Erie — the cruiser which shot down the rogue satellite last week. Between the talking points are some interesting tidbits. Here’s one: We’d been practicing for a month and a half when we got told we would possibly do […]

U.S. News has an interview with Captain R. M. Hendrickson, commanding officer on the USS Lake Erie -- the cruiser which shot down the rogue satellite last week. Between the talking points are some interesting tidbits. Here's one:

We'd been practicing for a month and a half when we got told we would possibly do the mission and kept working up with a team of government experts and technicians as well as industry partners, the folks that designed the Aegis weapons system and the missile itself, and started tracking the object at different times when we could when we were underway to get radar cross-section data and that sort of thing, which was helping build the eventual program and software that we used to do it.

Obviously, there was a lot of anticipation building up to it. Each time we practiced, each time we tracked, it got better. We went over probably 120, maybe 115 practice runs, what it would look like when we did it.

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