For China it's sketchy, for us it's safety.

A recent revelation from the Bush white house of plans to shoot down an old spy satellite have raised eyebrows across the world. Read this article if you get a chance, because I remember reading about China shooting down an old satellite about a year ago and Time magazine was highlighting the implications of anti-satellite weaponry. Now, Bush assures the international community that our very same situation is over concerns of "poisonous rocket fuel raining down on the planet". Of course this has nothing to do with our ASAT (anti-satellite) capabilities. Definitely not while China and Russia continue to push for a treaty banning the weaponization of space, which (of course) we oppose. In that same Time magazine, they wrote a scathing article of the effects of space debris caused by such acts. They said that little pellets of metal are orbiting our earth and that more and more junk is blown up up there creating more pellets. These pellets can be as small as sand, but travel fast enough to ruin a satellite or potentially the international space station. Of course the white house claims that if they shoot it just prior to entering the atmosphere it will reduce debris, while the article quotes an expert in this field as saying "[T]here would be only a 1 in 1000 chance of wiping out the [International Space Station]. Great." This is a politically awkward subject internationally, so it will be interesting to see Russia and China's reactions to this.