Let us pause to consider the Pentagon’s effort to shoot down USA-193, an intelligence-gathering satellite the size of a bus that went out of commission shortly after its launch in 2006 and then began hurtling toward Earth. A window of opportunity opened on Wednesday night and soon the world will know whether it has been saved from peril.

Who among us wants to be hit by a falling bus? And the shooting-it-before-it-impacts strategy has worked well many times before, usually in movies starring Bruce Willis.

However, as details emerged, the plan began to seem somewhat less attractive. We’ve been sending stuff into orbit for half a century. An estimated 17,000 items, weighing up to 100 tonnes, have already fallen back into the atmosphere. The odds against one of them hitting a human being are, at worst, several million to one.

The critical thing about USA-193, according to the Pentagon, is that it was carrying an unusual amount of fuel, which could release toxic fumes on impact. According to Gen James Cartwright of the Marines, it was the deadly gas threat that made President Bush decide to go for satellite assassination.

Let’s think about this for a minute. If you were, say, sitting on the porch reading the newspaper when a satellite plummeted into the backyard, emitting foul-smelling fumes, what are the chances you’d decided to stay very close to it and inhale a lot of it?

Continuing his explanation of the imminent threat, Cartwright said that the gas might cover an area “roughly the size of two football fields” and any unlucky person who wound up within proximity “would at least incur something that would make you go to the doctor”. The price tag for shooting USA-193 is up to $60 million.

Small, paranoid minds wondered if the government was not being completely forthright about its motives. The weapons the military mobilised to do the shooting are part of the missile defence system. Some people think the whole poison-gas story is just an excuse to give the Pentagon a chance to test its hardware.

This is only conceivable if you can imagine that the people who are in charge of intelligence-gathering might attempt to mislead the American public.

The only known instance of somebody shooting down a satellite occurred last year when the Chinese brought down one of their old weather satellites, also citing vague threats to humanity. At the time, the US was extremely peeved and complained the Chinese were creating space debris.

But in truth, the American military thought the Chinese military was demonstrating that they could knock out anything they shot into space whenever they felt like it.

So there is this suspicion that the Americans are just trying to prove we can do it back. Which would only make sense if we believed the leaders of the military-industrial complex were capable of behaving like babies.

Before it fired at the satellite on Wednesday night, the military was hesitating about making a shot, citing the possibility of “choppy seas”. Cynics who asked whether this means the nation’s quadrillion-dollar missile defence system only works when the weather is calm were told to stop being ridiculous.

All I know is, if something large and smelly plummets into your backyard, don’t forget to see a doctor.

The New York Times