The massive, 5,000-pound intelligence satellite -- USA-193 or NRO launch 21 -- was as large as a bus and had been operated by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office. It had been losing altitude in its orbit since being launched in December 2006 and would have crash burned up by March 6, possibly contaminating inhabited areas with its remaining fuel supply of 1,000 pounds of hydrazine.

The satellite was successful intercepted, hit and destroyed Wednesday by a RIM-161 Standard Missile-3 anti-ballistic missile interceptor fired from the Aegis-equipped cruiser USS Lake Erie operating off Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The interception took place at 10:26 p.m. EST Wednesday at an altitude of 150 miles. The satellite was flying at a speed of 17,000 miles per hour at the time.

Critics claimed that the satellite posed no real danger and would have burned up in the atmosphere anyway. This may well have been the case. But even if it was, the descent of the satellite provided a valuable opportunity to test and expand U.S. ballistic missile defense systems in a way that confirmed they had a highly important capability that had never been used before.

By the end of this year, the Navy will have at least 18 cruisers and destroyers equipped with their full BMD capabilities against intermediate-range missiles deployed around the world.

The successful test was an important step forward for several reasons. First, it confirmed that not only does the Navy's Aegis BMD system work against such a target, but it works well. The satellite was destroyed on the first shot.

As we have previously noted in these columns, over the past six years Aegis-guided SM-3 ABM interceptors have now been tested successfully so often they constitute a mature military technology. This is of exceptional importance not only to the United States, but to U.S. allies such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Israel that are also potentially at risk from intermediate-range ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads.

Second, even if the target satellite in question did not pose a truly serious environmental threat, in the future there may be satellites in deteriorating orbits that do carry much more hazardous payloads and that will need to be destroyed, preferably far from inhabited areas, as this target was. Environmental crises and technical failures by their very nature appear suddenly and unexpectedly, and therefore it is crucially important to know in advance that existing defense capabilities have been successfully tested against such targets.

For this reason, using the opportunity afforded by the decaying orbit of the spy satellite to test the ASAT capabilities of the Aegis-SM-3 systems was a no-lose proposition. If the satellite was an environmental threat, then obviously it was preferable that it should be destroyed at a high altitude. But even if it was not, or only a marginal threat, destroying it was still essential to test and confirm such capabilities so that they would be ready to be used if or when a real threat of that kind came along.

Third, the argument that the test would lead to the increasing militarization of space is an ineffectual one because this is not the first time an ASAT weapon has been successfully tested. And the previous nation to do so was not the United States. It was China, which astonished the world by destroying one of its own weather satellites in January 2007.

For that matter, it is no secret that both the United States and the Soviet Union had developed the very simple technology to destroy orbiting satellites more than 40 years ago. But both nations tacitly agreed not to test such capabilities because it was a mutual lose-lose situation for them.

Next: Why NROL-21 was an easy target

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