Rogue satellite destroyed by SM-3 ship-launched missile

It looks almost like when Alderaan was blown up.

What I am really enjoying about the press coverage of this event is how everyone pretty much understood that the shooting was more than just removing the threat of that dangerous satellite plummeting down to earth: it is also a technology demonstrator of a functional ballistic missile shield.

I also think it's really cool that the kill vehicle is kinetic (basically a huge bullet) instead of an explosive warhead. Tom Clancy explored this scenario with a similar platform, except the kill vehicle was an anti-air warhead. The technical challenge for that scenario was that the tracking software was making it follow the hottest part of the ballistic inbound, which is wrong since it would aim the missile at the tail end of the flying fireball surrounding the inbound. The warhead flies faster than the velocity of the explosive in the intercept missile, so by the time the missile blows up, the inbound is already too far to feel the explosion. Clancy's solution: switch to a radar tracker, which let them (at least in theory) track the actual inbound.

Fun stuff.