Both nations were and remain dependent on orbiting satellites for essential intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance and communications capabilities. China, which is far less dependent so far on orbiting space assets for those functions, therefore has far fewer compunctions about openly developing and displaying the capabilities to destroy them than either Moscow or Washington.

Orbiting satellites can certainly carry far more sinister payloads than communications or surveillance equipment. Having a capability to shoot down military systems satellite-weapons at short notice is therefore a very welcome capability to have.

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 fuel supply of 1,000 pounds of hydrazine.

The satellite was successful intercepted, hit and destroyed at 10:26 p.m. EST 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 an altitude of 130 miles.

As veteran U.S. arms negotiator Henry Cooper, former head of the Strategic Arms Initiative, and now chairman of High Frontier, an organization that studies missile defense and space use issues, pointed out on the PBS NewsHour Wednesday, the satellite interception took place at a relatively low altitude of 150 miles. This meant that debris from the destroyed target would not remain in orbit causing a navigation hazard to many other satellites from different countries, as was the case when the Chinese carried out their successful ASAT test just over a year ago at an altitude of 500 miles.

Cooper also summed up the reason why the satellite interception was unlikely to make the current military space race worse. "Russia has ABM systems deployed around Moscow. They're nuclear, of course, but they have an inherent capability against satellites, as well, if they wish to use them that way. So in much of this case, I believe this argument is political, rather than substantive," he said on the NewsHour.

Finally, one note of caution should be added: The NRO satellite was big -- the size of a bus. It reflected the increasing tendency of the NRO over the past 10-15 years to make its intelligence satellites bigger and bigger, in order to cram ever more numerous and complex systems on to them.

As a result, there is far more that can go wrong with malfunctioning systems on a satellite even when they are successfully fired into stable orbits, as they usually are.

But as Wednesday's test proved, it also makes them much bigger and therefore more detectable and vulnerable targets, which is why U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has asked for greatly increased funding in the latest Department of Defense budget to develop protective systems and countermeasures in order to better protect current U.S. space assets against disruptive attacks.

The exceptionally large size of the satellite that was shot down Wednesday as well as its predictable -- and therefore predicted -- decaying orbit therefore made it a far easier target to hit and kill than an incoming ICBM warhead that would be far smaller and whose flight path would have to be calculated within a period of only a few minutes rather than days or even weeks in advance as was the case with NROL-21. SM-3s are not designed to intercept ICBMs. Only Ground-Based Interceptors of the kind currently based at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., can do that.

On balance, however, Wednesday's interception confirmed the growing capabilities of U.S. BMD systems and made the United States a safer place. And that is a good bottom line to have.

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