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 decide to stay very close to it and inhale a lot of it?  Continuing his explanation of the imminent threat, General 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. Try making a list of the threats to your personal safety that could be reduced for that amount of money. For instance, there’s a construction site next to our office building, and I personally spend a great deal of time worrying that the monster crane will come crashing through my office window and squash me. I bet $60 million would go a long way toward convincing the contractors to find another way to lift things.  Small, paranoid minds wondered if the government was not being completely forthright about its motives. The weapons the military mobilized to do the shooting are part of the missile defense 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 United States was extremely peeved and complained the Chinese were creating space debris. (If you’re going to play in outer space, you really should clean up after yourself.)  But in truth, our military thought their military was demonstrating that they could knock out anything we shot into space whenever they felt like it.  So there is this suspicion that we’re 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.  — The Pentagon is afraid the supersecret satellite will fall into the hands of our enemies, revealing the sophisticated new technology that conked out shortly after leaving Earth and utterly failed to accomplish its mission.  — Pentagon is hoping to bolster support for the missile defense system by demonstrating that it has many other side benefits, such as the ability to shoot down rogue satellites full of poisonous gas that could force victims to endure inconvenient waits at the doctor’s office.  — Pentagon wants something to think about besides sectarian religious feuds in the Middle East.  Before it fired at the satellite 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 defense 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.  A version of this op-ed appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Look, Up in the Sky!. Today's Paper|Subscribe
As details emerged, the Pentagon’s plan to shoot down an intelligence-gathering satellite began to seem somewhat less attractive.