I heard about this nice little dose of irony a few weeks ago.

A U.S. spy satellite was fated to come hurling down towards Earth. And all I could do was laugh. Because that’s just brilliant. You can’t make this kind of stuff up. Then, when they discussed the possibility of blowing it out of the sky, I laughed and fondly remembered the presentation of such an event that my father, brother Clayton and I saw at the Air Show at Edwards AFB in October of ‘06. No one had ever written comedy gold of that caliber.

Well, tonight’s the night. The US Navy is going to make not one, but two attempts, to shoot this bastard satellite out of the sky.

“Adding to the difficulty of the shootdown mission, the missile will have to do better than just hit the bus-sized satellite, a Navy official said Tuesday. It needs to strike the relatively small fuel tank aboard the spacecraft in order to accomplish the main goal, which is to eliminate the toxic fuel that could injure or even kill people if it reached Earth. The Navy official described technical aspects of the missile’s capabilities on condition that he not be identified.”

Oh, but wait! There’s more!

“Also complicating the effort will be the fact that the satellite has no heat-generating propulsion system on board. That makes it more difficult for the Navy missile’s heat-seeking system to work, although the official said software changes had been made to compensate for the lack of heat.”

Cool! So, let’s send a heat-seeking missile to something that DOESN’T EMIT HEAT. Awesome. Genius. Software change? Yeah, okay, Boss.

So, who wants to join me tonight for some Pacific Ocean caught seafood, since I’ll never friggin’ touch it again.

See ya around, Hawaii. It was nice knowin’ ya.

(Also, the category of this post is “I believe in Science.” Because I do. I do not, however, believe in the US Government.)