Perhaps the simplest way to attack a satellite is to hit it with a missile from Earth. Knocking some of them out is the surest way to blind, deafen and disorient America’s armed forces when they are far from home. This makes its satellites attractive targets. The Pentagon’s bandwidth consumption rises by around a third every year.Īmerica outspends the rest of the world on military space capabilities by a ratio of three to one. Getting data from a single Global Hawk drone like the one shot down by Iran on June 20th requires at least 500 megabits a second of satellite bandwidth-five times the rate at which all America’s armed forces used satellite communications during the 1991 Gulf war. The third role is to get information into and out of desolate warzones. From a rarity 30 years ago, precision-guided bombs have become, for America, the norm. This is where America’s 24-satellite Global Positioning System ( GPS) and some of its lesser competitors-China’s BeiDou, Europe’s Galileo, India’s NAVIC, Japan’s QVSS and Russia’s GLONASS-come in. The second is to tell troops, and bombs, exactly where they are. Twelve missiles just launched! Spy satellites also eavesdrop on communications and radar emissions. What forces does the enemy possess? And tactical ones.
One is to spot things below, in order to answer strategic questions. Satellites enable modern war in three ways. To date, though, most military operations in orbit have not been geared to war in space they use tools in space to help them fight wars on Earth. As soon as German V-2 rockets started travelling through space on the way to Belgium and Britain in 1944, military minds turned to what could be done with weapons that tarried there. “Space is no longer a sanctuary,” Patrick Shanahan, then America’s acting secretary of defence, told a space-industry audience in Colorado Springs in April. In 2007 China tested an anti-satellite missile earlier this year India did the same. On July 13th President Emmanuel Macron said that he too had approved the creation of a new space command within the French air force. China and Russia established new units for managing war in space four years ago. But international negotiations to ban or regulate anti-satellite and other space weapons have been stalled for years.The people in the converted Titan rocket facility that houses CSp OC are not the only ones concerned with such matters. Because such a missile defense system could also target satellites, many countries want it outlawed. military leaders have pushed for the United States to achieve “space superiority,” in part by developing a controversial system that could destroy incoming enemy missiles. But both the United States and China have shown they can target and destroy satellites.
So far, weapons have not been deployed in space that threaten satellites, nor has a satellite been deliberately destroyed by hostile action. Moreover, an attack on a satellite also would add to the more than 12,000 pieces of potentially dangerous space junk already orbiting the Earth at speeds exceeding 17,000 miles per hour.
The more than 1,000 active satellites orbiting the Earth present vulnerable targets to hostile nations, and attacks could cause wide-ranging damage: Weather satellites help predict hurricanes communication satellites support telephones and other electronics and satellite-based navigation networks provide myriad services worldwide.
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