Attacks on satellites: is it the start of the arms race in space?

Last year, an American general made an ominous revelation: Two orbiting Russian satellites were stalking an American spy satellite in Earth orbit.

It was not clear if the Cosmos satellites could attack the USA-245, American.

“This has the potential to create a dangerous situation in space,” said General Jay Raymond, chief of the Pentagon’s Space Command.

The incident happened, but it marked one, where potentially bomb-armed satellites, spacecraft that fire lasers, and other technologies have gone from science fiction to reality.

The stakes became clear on Monday when Russia launched a missile from Earth that blew up one of its own satellites.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called the act “reckless.”

“It shows that Russia is now developing new weapons systems that can shoot down satellites”he said in a meeting Tuesday with EU defense ministers.

Kamikaze satellites

The militarization of space is as old as the space race itself: as soon as Sputnik was put into orbit in 1957, Washington and Moscow began to explore

At first, the biggest concern was nuclear weapons in space. In 1967, superpowers and other countries signed the Outer Space Treaty, which banned weapons of mass destruction in orbit.

Since then, Russia, the United States, China and even India have explored ways to fight in space outside of the treaty.

That competence today focuses on the, which are increasingly essential for the communications, surveillance and navigation of any advanced army.

In 1970, Moscow successfully tested an explosives-laden satellite that could destroy another orbiting satellite.

The United States responded in 1983, when then-President Ronald Reagan announced his ambitious Strategic Defense Initiative, the “Star Wars” program that promised to emit lasers or microwaves.

Much of the technology envisioned then was unfeasible. But in a landmark move, the Pentagon used a missile to destroy a failed satellite in a 1985 test.

Since then, rivals have tried to show that they have the same aim: China in 2007 and India in 2019.

This is why, after trying for some time, the success of Monday’s Russian takedown

“The Russians did not need to detonate the satellite to show that they had the ability to do so”said Isabelle Sourbes-Verger, a space expert at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

Instead, the episode was a demo “That, if necessary, Russia will not allow the United States to be the only one to control space”, said.

Space stalkers

Countries keep an intense secret about their military space activities and, given that many of the technologies involved are of double use – they have civil and defense purposes -,

But the race is such that by 2019, the year the Pentagon established its Space Force, it believed that Russia and China had the potential to surpass the United States.

“Maintaining US dominance in this area is now the mission of the US Space Force,” then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper said.

The race has evolved from the idea of ​​destroying satellites with missiles, or kamikaze satellites, to looking for other ways to damage them with

Both Russia and China have developed “space stalkers” satellites that can be manipulated to physically interfere with others, according to Brian Chow, an independent space policy analyst who spent 25 years at the Rand Corp think tank.

With robotic arms, “They can simply stalk the adversary satellite and move it to another location, or bend an antenna” stop, Chow said.

Those satellites are still few, but Russia’s deployment of two to threaten an American satellite in 2020 shows that the technology has arrived.

In addition, both China and the United States have top-secret programs of small winged, reusable and robotic spacecraft, which and damage rival satellites.

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