Free Beacon ? LOL
Such a collective reading.
Jonathan McDowell@planet4589
@cosmos4u my conclusion was that K7 was not itself an ASAT test, but was a test of the launch vehicle and tracking for such an ASAT.
Kunpeng-7
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China reported the launch of a suborbital high altitude sounding rocket
on May 13 to an altitude of more than (but of order?) 10000 km, and possibly
of order 30000 km.
The Chinese report said that a barium release was carried out at around
`1 wan' (10000) km, and that the rocket went higher than `1 wan' km, but
did not specify how much higher. The US Dept of Defense reports that it
tracked the launch on a path to `nearly GEO' with reentry 'over the
Indian Ocean': Since GEO is at 35780 km, the vague phrase `nearly GEO'
might seem to imply an apogee closer to 30-35 thousand km than 10
thousand . However, US intelligence has been floating the possibility of
a GEO-altitude Chinese ASAT test; one might therefore worry that if they
only tracked it early in flight with resulting large apogee
uncertainties, they may be prone to getting the answer they expected. It
is hard to draw firm conclusions without a more precise statement from
the DoD (or, for that matter, from China).
For the record the full statement from LtCol Catherine Wilkinson, Dept
of Defense, kindly forwarded by Tomotaro Inoue of Kyodo News, is:
"We detected a launch on May 13 from within China. The launch appeared
to be on a ballistic trajectory nearly to geosynchronous Earth orbit. We
tracked several objects during the flight but did not observe the
insertion of any objects into orbit and no objects associated with this
launch remain in space.
"Based upon observations, we assess that the objects reentered the
atmosphere above the Indian Ocean. We defer any further questions to the
government of China."
The rocket appears to have been launched on a 32 deg inclination path SE
from Xichang (based on NOTAM analysis) and according to reports on
nasaspaceflight.com its flight was observed widely in SE China and Hong
Kong.
The Kunpeng-7 magnetosphere science payload was reported to have
included a Langmuir probe, particle detectors, a magnetometer, and a
barium cloud release. Because of the relatively unusual secrecy
preceding the launch some analysts concluded that the mission was
actually a military one. The only previous large military program known
to have launched from Xichang in recent years was the antisatellite test
program; the launch vehicle for Kunpeng-7 was reported to be from the
CASIC company and was probably a variant of the DF-21 missile used in
that program or its DF-31 cousin. It is indeed possible that this launch
was to qualify a new launch vehicle variant intended to carry a high
altitude ASAT payload - but there's no evidence that such a payload was
carried on this particular flight.
This is the highest altitude suborbital flight since Gravity Probe A in
1976, and possibly since Blue Scout Jr O-2 in 1961. If the rocket
reached 30000 km, its flight may have lasted 8 to 9 hours and impacted
in the Indian Ocean - moving east for the first hour or so, and then to
the southwest as it slowed and the Earth's rotation overtook it, passing
perhaps over Malaysia and Sumatra, then east again in the final hour of
descent. Flights like this can loosely be described as sounding rockets,
but the more precise term of art is 'vertical probe', which was used to
describe similar Soviet and US high altitude suborbital flights in the
1960s and 1970s.
Unlike typical sounding rocket or ICBM launches, although this launch
was suborbital it had more than orbital energy, which places it in a
special category; I assign the launch a 'U-series' pseudo-international
designation (U for uncataloged or unusual, take your pick) of 2013-U01.
You'll find other interesting launches in this category if you dig
through my online launch vehicle database. I estimate the launch had a
C3 (specific binding energy, -GM/a) of at least -42 km^2/s^2 and perhaps
as much as -19, (compared to a LEO C3 of circa -58 and a GTO C3 of -16;
C3>=0 is needed for Earth escape). I also find it useful to characterize
orbits by their specific total energy ETOT, ETOT = GM/R(Earth) - GM/2a,
which represents the sum of kinetic and potential energy relative to an
inertial point on the geoid - ETOT is just 2 * C3 plus a constant,
For this launch ETOT was between 41 and 53 in these units compared
to 33 for LEO and 54 for GTO. For comparison sounding rockets typically
have circa C3 = -118, ETOT = 3 and ICBMs have C3 = -80, ETOT = 21. (ETOT
is defined as the sum of inertial kinetic and potential energy at apogee).
