Irrelevant Cheetah

“Excuse me, General Whatzit?”

“Yes? What is it, Colonel?”

“Sir, do you remember Satellite USA-193? The one we lost control of not long after it launched?”

“Yes. What about it?”

“Well, our experts are telling us that its orbit is decaying quickly, and that it will re-enter the atmosphere within the next few weeks. And the problem is, it’s not expected to break up completely.”

“So what? It’ll probably land in the ocean, right?”

“Well, sir, it might, but what if it doesn’t? There’s classified technology on board that craft. Not to mention the pictures of Jennifer Aniston’s boobs that you had us zoom in on and take last summer when she was at the beach.”

“All right, all right. Only one thing to do, it seems. Let’s shoot ‘er down.”

“There are a few problems with that, General. First of all, we threw a serious hissy when China did that last year. Said it would start a new arms race if they demonstrated the ability to shoot down a satellite.”

“Oh, I don’t give a rat’s ass. They’re just commie bastards, anyway. And they’re not supposed to have that ability. Only us. Tell you what – we’ll tell everybody that we have to shoot it down to save people from the dangerous fuel. What’s it called again?”

“Hydrazine?”

“Yeah, that’s it. It’s toxic, ain’t it? We’ll say that we have to shoot it down to protect human life. A ‘toxic gas cloud’ might occur. Yeah, that sounds good.”

“But, General, it’s bullshit. The space shuttle Columbia had hydrazine on board when it blew up, and nobody was in any danger. And we had 9 other satellites re-enter the atmosphere last year, at least one of which had several hundred kilos of hydrazine, and we weren’t worried then.”

“I don’t care, Colonel. This will show the Chinese that we mean business. And it’ll give me a chance to practice my aim. I can only play Siphon Filter on my Xbox 360 so many times, you know?”

“Very well, sir. I’ll get the NASA administrator to attend the briefing. That’ll make this look like it’s on the up-and-up.”

“Very good, Colonel. Keep me informed.”

This post is releasing a toxic gas cloud over at humor-blogs.com.