DoD Confident of Successful Satellite Intercept

General James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held a news briefing at the Pentagon today providing information related to a missile intercept of a non-functioning satellite.

Gen. Cartwright showed reporters video of the missile launch and the moment of impact with the satellite. Here’s the video, courtesy of the Department of Defense. Watch for the moment of impact at the 40-second mark.

After presenting the video, Gen. Cartwright commented, "We're very confident that we hit the satellite. We also have a high degree of confidence that we got the tank."

Gen. Cartwright said, "[L]et me give you a sense of what we've got. We have a fireball, and given that there's no fuel, that would indicate that that's a hydrazine fire. We have a vapor cloud that formed. That, again, would be likely to be the hydrazine. We also have some spectral analysis from airborne platforms that indicate the presence of hydrazine after the intercept. So again, that would indicate to us that the hydrazine vented overboard in some quantity, and we're starting to see that in space."

He continued, "Any one of those as a stand-alone is not a smoking gun, so we're putting the pieces together. I would tell you that it's probably going to take us another 24 to 48 hours to get to a point where we are very comfortable with our analysis that we indeed breached the tank. [But] the high-definition imagery that we have indicates that we hit the spacecraft right in the area of the tank."

During a Q&A session following the briefing, Gen. Cartwright expressed his degree of confidence in the operation's success: "I would tell you, from watching and from participating, that we're in the very, very high -- 80, 90 percent sure -- that the tank was breached. That's my opinion. We're going to try to validate that with assessment today. We are proceeding as if we didn't. In other words, we're posturing ourselves to go out and recover a hydrazine tank that maybe didn't get breached. And we'll hold those measures in place until we have a degree of certainty that the tank was breached and that the hydrazine was vented off."