Interview with the Captain of the USS Lake Erie
Capt. R. M. Hendrickson stepped across the deck of the guided missile cruiser USS Lake Erie last Saturday afternoon to a bank of ballistic missile launch tubes, motioning to the particular 2-by-2-foot location from which a missile flew from the ship positioned at the time some 420 miles northwest of Hawaii.
The missile hit its target, destroying a defective intelligence satellite that was falling toward Earth at 17,000 miles per hour. It was unclear where the satellite would have hit had it crashed, most likely into the ocean. But the Pentagon had expressed particular concern about the school bus-size satellite's fuel tank filled with 1,000 pounds of hydrazine—which defense officials soberly described in a news release as "a hazardous fuel which could pose a danger to people on earth."
|