China’s Space Military

Will we see space warfare? According to the U.S. Department of Defense China is getting anti-satellite weapons ready.

Image by Colin Behrens from Pixabay

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You can hear people saying that the next war will be waged in cyberspace. But people tend to forget about another space. Space! It may not seem like it, but we are very dependent on our technologies in orbit and this is especially the case for the military.

Luckily, we have not seen a war in space. Yet. But we definitely have the capacities to do so. While China has been saying that they don’t want to militarize space a new release from the Pentagon suggests otherwise.

China has been working on developing rockets and electronic weapons that could destroy satellites in both low and high orbit. China already does have rockets that could hit satellites in low orbit. And the report suggests that China wants to get stronger in this area and wants weapons that can also hit satellites in higher orbits – up to the geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers high.

Anti-Satellite Weapons Are Not Just Theory

In 2007, China already shot down its own meteorological satellite FY-1C on the polar orbit. Luckily, similar tests aren’t common. This is because and destruction that happens in orbit causes large amounts of space debris to be created. The destruction of FY-1C created over 2000 fragments with a size of 1 centimeter or more. And its destruction was particularly bad as it happened at a height of 850. This means up to 30 % of fragments larger than 10 will still be in orbit in 2035.

But the Chinese test certainly wasn’t the first nor the last. In the sixties and seventies, both the Americans and Russians were working on Anti-Satellite weapons. And in the USA the program was later reinstated. We know of satellite destruction in 1985 which was done by a rocket shot from a fighter-plane and destroyed a satellite at a height of 525 kilometers. Or in 2008, the USA shot down a dysfunctional spy-satellite from the USS Lake Erie using a rocket. The last such test we know of happened in March 2019 when India destroyed its own satellite in low-orbit.

Sources:

• https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FINAL.PDF

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