On the list of all-time non-reassuring assurances, today's Pentagon statement about the downing of crippled U.S. spy satellite ranked high."We're very confident that we hit the satellite," said Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We also have a high degree of confidence that we got the tank."

That's like saying, "We know we hit the plane, and we're pretty sure we got the nuclear warhead it was carrying, too." Coming just over a year after China shot down a satellite of its own in a similar display of missile-accuracy muscle, yesterday's mission, not surprisingly, set off fears of a new and ominous "arms race in space."

"The operation also added to concerns about disruption of space assets vital for 21st-century global commerce and security," Reuters noted in an analysis today.

But shooting down satellites is old hat -- we've been doing that since the Cold War. For people worried about a new space-based arms race, I have bad news: it's already under way. Only the "arms" involved are not missiles or space-based death rays, but big telecom satellites being launched in a drive to provide more bandwidth down here in terrestrial space. After a major crash following the bursting of the tech bubble in 2001-02 and a series of embarrassing flops, including the explosion of a Sea Launch Zenit 3SL rocket on its ocean-based platform last year, the global satellite industry is enjoying a major boom: