Kinetic kill is exactly what "Russians" (the military, the country isn't a monolithic entity) couldn't do before. The Soviet Kontakt system never passed the fin

Kinetic kill is exactly what "Russians" (the military, the country isn't a monolithic entity) couldn't do before. The Soviet Kontakt system never passed the final live test because the Union had crashed. Anyone who paid any attention knew that Nudol was in slow development for a decade, had been fired blank many times and had to be tested on a live target someday, for the contractor to complete the job. How can you trust a weapon that's never been properly tested? Good candidates in lower orbits were all short-lived and reentered long ago, and possibly weren't sufficient to test the claimed performance, to start with. What even makes you think they "haven't bothered"? I have no idea why they didn't launch a dedicated target though - might have been budgetary reasons, bureaucratic failure, or because of a specific test envelope. Alternatively, the military rarely care when it involves strategic matters, you can complain but it just works this way. In particular US military who blew up the Solwind observatory at 550km to test the ASM-135, the only US ASAT weapon currently in operation. It was in 1985, the same time when USSR was developing its counterpart, so it's easy to posture as morally superior when you already did the damage and there's currently no need for another ASAT weapon. Edit: here's a better analysis than most: https://spacenews.com/op-ed-lessons-to-learn-from-russias-nudol-asat-test/ https://spacenews.com/op-ed-lessons-to-learn-from-russias-nu... (meta: threads like this usually have little substance and garbage quality for HN standards. People start assuming all kinds of things and post kneejerk reactions without even bothering to research what's publicly available. I typically avoid posting in these, but then they just become outrage bubbles)