Terri is a member of a huge low-carb support board. One of the other members a genuine rocket scientist who works for NASA. Terri copied and pasted some of my concerns about the satellite shoot-out and asked the rocket scientist. The response:

Shooting down the satellite won’t pose any danger to communications or anything. Almost all communications satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, meaning they stay over the same part of the earth all the time. It takes an altitude of about 22,000 miles to achieve geosynch orbit. This satellite had a failure before it could fire its rockets to get to a high orbit, so it’s coasting down in a degrading orbit around 150 miles altitude.

When they shoot it down it will degrade faster and the pieces will be down in a few weeks. A year or so ago, the Chinese shot down a satellite from about 500 miles and that debris will be in orbit for decades.

The hydrazine fuel is INCREDIBLY NASTY stuff. Sometimes I have huge qualms about being in the space biz because we use the most horrendous chemicals known to man, and launching anything releases horrible stuff into the atmosphere. We learned from Columbia that these spherical gas tanks survive re-entry almost completely intact, and can rupture at impact. The satellite has full tanks and that can do a lot of damage.

Yes, of course there could be some spy hide-the-technology game, but I don’t think there’s much downside to shooting the sucker down.

Of course, Terri is still going to be hiding under the bed tonight at 10:30 when they try to shoot the thing down (weather permitting).

So, I was right about us getting home around 3:00 or 4:00, but for entirely the wrong reasons – they canceled his surgery.  Everyone showed up…  We went to the hospital…  The started an IV, wheeled him down to the OR…  Terri waited with him for over an hour…  And then they announced that his Dr. had an emergency and they had to re-schedule his surgery.

Now, I’m not really that upset.  I assume the Dr. probably had something much more pressing than a minor hernia repair…  Something like a life or death operation maybe…  So I can certainly understand that there were probably more important things that Christopher’s operation.  But it’s still annoying.

Terri has been stressing for days, several people drove over an hour to be here, I took the day off from work, Christopher himself was starting to get stressed out towards the end there…  And now we get to do it all over again.  Bah!

Slashdot | USA 193 Shootdown Set For Feb 21, 03:30 UTC

“Amateur satellite watcher Ted Molczan notes that a “Notice to Airmen” (NOTAM) has been issued announcing restricted airspace for February 21, between 02:30 and 05:00 UTC, in a region near Hawaii. Stricken satellite USA 193, which the US has announced plans to shoot down, will pass over this area at about 03:30. Interestingly, this is during the totality of Wednesday’s lunar eclipse, which may or may not make debris easier to observe.”

Yup, they’re going to shoot it down.

Terri is absolutely terrified that some chunk of debris is going to land on her.  I’m not so worried about that…  The odds of anything re-entry and a missile blast are pretty slim, and then there’s an awful lot of Earth for the bits to hit.  The odds of actually being personally affected by this are so close to zero that there isn’t much point in worrying.

But I am somewhat concerned about what it’ll do to orbital real-estate.  We’ve already got problems with orbital debris from other mishaps and experiments.

I think it’s pretty obvious that shooting down this satellite has less to do with the tank of hydrazine on board than it does one-upping China and making sure nothing classified gets into the wrong hands.  I just hope somebody has carefully considered the affects of blowing up this satellite…  I’d hate to be reading about dozens of dead satellites in a couple days.

Last night we watched Bug.  I was more or less expecting some kind of sci-fi horror type thing…  I’m not sure why I had that expectation, something from the press surrounding it or the previews I saw.  But that is what I was expecting, something about killer bugs.

As I read reviews and comments from people who’d watched Bug, it became apparent that my expectation was wrong.  It was apparently about paranoia and government conspiracies.  They were listening in, They made the bugs, They were going to come get you.  But it still sounded like some kind of vaguely sci-fi horror movie.

What I watched last night had absolutely no resemblance to my expectations in any way, shape, or form.  I don’t know what the hell that was.  It wasn’t about bugs, or paranoia, or government conspiracy; it was about psychosis and delusions.  There was nothing sci-fi about it at all.  No aliens, no unmarked helicopters, just crazy people getting weirder and weirder.

I suppose it was put together well enough…  The acting was pretty damn good, the cinematography was good, the characters were interesting…  But it was so much not what I was expecting that I was really taken aback.  I wanted to watch a horror movie, I wanted to see critters and aliens.  I didn’t really want to watch a couple people going crazy together.

Today is Christopher’s surgery.  Nothing major, just a minor hernia to repair.  He’s got to be at the hospital at 11:00 and the operation is at 1:00.  I’m assuming we’ll be home around 3:00 or 4:00.  Christopher is pretty relaxed so far.  He’s a little apprehensive about the IV, but that’s about it.  Terri is absolutely terrified.  Me, I figure it’s another day off from work.

Normally I’m pretty happy when the weather turns warm.  I’ve been whining and complaining about the cold for months now, declaring every few days that I’m sick of the cold and ready for spring.  But last night the weather suddenly turned warm, and I wasn’t all that happy about it.

The frequent temperature shifts are playing hell with my sinuses.  One day they’re dried out and sore from the cold and dry air…the next they’re plugged up from the sudden humidity as the snow melts.  And we normally sleep with our window open a crack for fresh air – so when it suddenly got warm last night our room got very warm.  I suddenly found myself horribly congested and too warm.  Ruined my sleep for the whole night.

I’ve spent most of the day feeling somewhat groggy and my sinuses are killing me.  At this point I’m not sure if I really care whether it’s warm or cold, but I’d love the weather to finally settle on one or the other for a while.

I grabbed the demo for Soulstorm from FilePlanet…about 1.2 GB to download.  Always seems odd to me to download such a huge file for a simple demo.  I remember when 1.2 GB was considered massive.  I’ve played plenty of games that weren’t even that big for the entire install.  And these days that’s just a drop in the bucket…

The first thing that I noticed is that the introductory movie is much lower quality than those in Dawn of War, Winter Assault, and Dark Crusade.  The intro for Dawn of War literally gave me goosebumbs.  The intro movie for Soulstorm is fairly low resolution…  Pretty grainy…  Not terribly impressive.  I don’t know that it matters much, since it’s just an introductory movie, but it immediately made me worried about the quality of the game itself.  The fact that Soulstorm is being developed by Iron Lore, a company I know absolutely nothing about, didn’t help matters either.

As soon as I fired up a game though, my fears were allayed.  It’s still the same engine and same basic gameplay mechanics that made the rest of the Dawn of War games so much fun to play.

The demo features the same tutorial map as all the other Dawn of War games, a single skirmish battle, and a single storyline battle.  The demo limits you to the Dark Eldar, but it looks like the entire tech tree is available – no units disabled just because it’s a demo.

The Dark Eldar play about like you’d expect for a bunch of evil Eldar.  They’re sick, twisted, and malicious.  Their units all inflict cruel damage upon their enemies and lower morale very quickly, but they can’t take much of a punch.  They’re quick and brutal, but just as fragile as any other Eldar.  One interesting mechanic is the harvesting of souls to power various magical/psychic attacks.  When any unit dies they leave a glowing purple soul on the battlefield for a few moments.  Certain units can harvest that soul.  When you’ve got enough souls you can use powerful abilities to rain death and destruction on your enemies.

The propaganda indicates that the second new faction, the Sisters of Battle, also has a unique resource to harvest – faith – which can be used to call down miracles.

Also new to the gameplay in Soulstorm are flying units.  Each faction now has a flying unit or two, as well as upgrades and units to defend against flying units.  The key thing that flight allows is bypassing of various terrain obstacles.  You no longer have to go around walls, you can go right over them.  I’m sure this will be instrumental in several of the stoyline battles, but in the demo it really didn’t amount to much.  The flying units behaved more or less the same way as any land-based unit.  They certainly weren’t overpowering in any way.

Just like in Dark Crusade, Soulstorm features a strategic map that you slowly conquer.  You’ll be able to pick your fights and earn upgrades along the way.  This time around it looks like you’ll be conquering more than one planet.

What’s not real clear at this point is whether you’ll be able to play all the races in the single-player conquest mode, or just the two new ones.  It looks like they’ll all be available for the multiplayer…  But I can’t find a clear answer for the single-player.  I’d love to crush a few planets under a Necron fist.