Hope is not a plan

One of the downsides of successfully testing your antisatellite missile?

A 2,600km-wide debris cloud.

Chalk one up to the PRC for bad orbital citizenship.

The canonical "three Rs" of sound resource management are reduce, reuse and recycle.

The European Space Agency is applying this in a very clever way to providing satellite radio service to people on the ground.

Although broadcast television satellites are quite well built, they typically run out of fuel in a decade or so. Unable to correct their position, they drift -- making them useless for television broadcasting. However, if you could track them, you could still use them as a broadcast source.

The ground system developed by the ESA takes advantage of these satellites' durability by placing a tracking receiver, tied to a cache, into a car on the ground. The receiver can then maintain signal as the car drives, precaching signal for those times when the car goes through a tunnel or otherwise loses the feed -- just as modern "skip-proof" CD players precache music so they can keep playing evenly as you smack over a speed bump.

Should this go into wide use, it will represent an impressive reuse of "obselete" space systems, with the dual benefits of reducing the need for new systems and the expense of providing this type of service.

We've introduced a lot of infrastructure into the world, and we tend to drop it long before it actually becomes useless. Adaptations like this are part of our new wave of combined fiscal and environmental responsibility.

BBC article

It appears (pending final confirmation) that the U.S. Navy successfully hit and fragmented the USA-193 spy satellite before it reentered the atmosphere.

Naturally, Russia and China have posted the de rigeur complaints about arms proliferation and such. One might imagine the Chinese would complain less, having much more messily destroyed a satellite about a year ago, a process that generated a 2,600 km wide swathe of orbital debris.

al Jazeera article
BBC article