One more thing to keep us up at night!

Beware of supersonic paint chips!

The Cuban missile crisis gave a certain farm boy nightmares of a mushroom cloud rising into the sky behind the sileage silos to the southwest, in the general direction of Madison WI.

Now The Werkes learns that Russia has launched 1,240 miles above planet Earth a satellite named Cosmos 2553. It has that orbit to itself — 20 miles higher than the thousands (really! who knew?) of other satellites, including the International Space Station.

New York Times national security correspondent W.J. Hennigan thinks its purpose is to detonate a nuclear bomb in space that would wipe out all the telecommunications satellites, thereby shutting down pretty much everything — including talk radio! First we’ve heard of it.

There are tons of blinking, beeping metal contraptions orbiting earth; 90 nations — and several billionaires — have thrown satellites into orbit. Elon Musk, alone, tossed 6,500 Starlink satellites up there. Jeff Bezos at Amazon wants his own. China plans to launch 40,000. At this rate, the night sky will light up like the LEDs on the Las Vegas Sphere, probably graphically advertising those ubiquitous Ellipsis machines. (“My jointsss feel betterrrr, my hipsss feel betterrr …”)

If Cosmos 2553 or its successors detonate a celestial big bang, Hennigan reports that the indentured servants at Stately Blaska Manor would hear no sound, see no fire, feel no shock wave. There would be no mushroom cloud. But what a show, just the same!

People would see a brilliant light followed by dazzling auroras generated by a burst of electrons colliding with gases in the atmosphere. The detonation would disable and destroy everything in its immediate vicinity, turning satellites into unguided projectiles that could crash into one another. Objects in low orbits travel at around 17,000 miles per hour. Any debris — even as small and light as a paint chip — would pose real danger to other objects or people in space. …

There would be widespread impact on travel and shipping, banking and financial markets, the oil and gas industries, and farming and supply chains.  … The bomb’s electromagnetic pulse could cause crippling blackouts and permanently damage electrical grids. — “A nuclear blast in space could change life as we know it.”

Meaning our b&w Philco would go dark!

 Everybody knows this is nowhere 🎵

Space junk from 90 nations could come crashing down all around us if it doesn’t burn up on re-entry. Which is why, when most nations purposely jettison satellites past their sell-by dates, they bring them down over the world’s most remote place: Point Nemo. If you have a globe, that’s where the logo likely is printed. It’s in the South Pacific midway between an island belonging to Antarctica (“a breeding ground for Adelie penguins’), one of the Easter Islands, and an atoll off the island where the mutineers of the HMS Bounty settled, Pitcairn island. Nemo is 1,670-point-4 miles from all three. (From Madison WI to Las Vegas NV is 1,700 miles.) In other words, the closet human beings at Point nemo are neither north, south, east, or west but UP — aboard the International Space Station 1,200 miles above when it orbits over Point Nemo, as it does once every day on its 16 daily orbits around planet Earth.

This “spacecraft cemetery” should accommodate plenty more space junk before it fills up and forms another disputed island. The bottom of the Pacific ocean there is 13,000 feet deep. The Titanic is 12,500 feet down in the North Atlantic. (The deepest spot on earth is 36,037 below sea level at Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, just south of Guam. Mount Everest is 29,032 feet in the other direction.)

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Cosmos 2553 sounds like Russia’s real-life version of premier Dimitri Kissov’s Doomsday Machine. While the French and the West restore the timeless beauty of Notre Dame cathedral, Vladimir Putin gives mass murderer Bashar al-Assad, expelled by his own people, a safe place to bunk and figures ways to kill us all. That’s what we’re up against.

Has Putin left a light on
for the assassin of the health care CEO, too?