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• Missile strikes ailing U.S. spy satellite

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• Defense/military

Originally published February 21, 2008 at 6:41 a.m. PT

What do you do when a spy satellite goes kerflooey and starts to fall back to Earth? Call in the U.S. Navy. That was what President Bush decided to do to take out said defunct satellite before it could crash-land, with the potential, the government says, of spewing a toxic fuel called hydrazine in a populated area.

At about 7:30 p.m. PST on Wednesday, the USS Lake Erie fired a single Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) that intercepted the satellite some 130 nautical miles above the Pacific Ocean--a relatively low altitude, the Pentagon said.

Credit: U.S. Navy

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