Things That Go Bump in the Sky, Part Deux

Some things never change: Russian government officials are still paranoid.

A collision between U.S. and Russian satellites in early February may have been a test of new U.S. technology to intercept and destroy satellites rather than an accident, a Russian military expert has said.

According to official reports, one of 66 satellites owned by Iridium, a U.S. telecoms company, and the Russian Cosmos-2251 satellite, launched in 1993 and believed to be defunct, collided on February 10 about 800 kilometers (500 miles) above Siberia.

However, Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Leonid Shershnev, a former head of Russia's military space intelligence, said in an interview published by the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper on Tuesday that the U.S. satellite involved in the collision was used by the U.S. military as part of the "dual-purpose" Orbital Express research project, which began in 2007.

Orbital Express was a space mission managed by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a team led by engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC).

DARPA has been blamed for everything from crop circles, Morgellon's Disease, beached whales, dust storms in China, and global warming.

Damn, it's a fine thing to be an American and have such terrific tools!

But if Russians would think about this logically, they'd realize that no American, not even those scary Peter Sellers-types in the underground bunkers, would do anything to jeopardize satellite TV reception this close to March Madness.

That truly is unthinkable.