![space warfare could happen space warfare could happen](https://www.petrofilm.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/map_01_0_C.92142817_std.jpg)
Potential missile attacks on military satellites “tend to get most of the attention, but that is not all that we see happening around the world,” said Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS and a principal author of its report, during an April 6 livestream.įor example, the thousands of everyday satellites that already circle low-Earth orbit, below an altitude of 1,200 miles, could potentially suffer collateral damage. For Israel’s space program, Weeden said, little good data is available. For example, India has invested heavily in space infrastructure and capabilities, while Japan’s post–World War II space activities were limited until a recent change to its constitution. (Notably, CSIS’s report doesn’t include the American military.) Each nation has unique abilities and characteristics. The new reports use available evidence and intelligence to explore a range of weapons that various countries’ militaries are developing or testing-or already have operational. “What worries us in the international community is that there aren’t necessarily any guardrails for how people are going to start interfering with others’ space systems,” said Daniel Porras, a space security fellow at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.
![space warfare could happen space warfare could happen](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ww-ii.jpg)
Many more countries now have space programs, including India, Iran, North Korea, France, Japan, and Israel.ĭespite this expansion-and the array of new space weapons-relevant policies and regulatory bodies have remained stagnant. Today, Burbach added, the world is very different compared with the Cold War era, when access to space was essentially limited to the United States and the Soviet Union. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, who was not involved in the new research. “Those are absolutely the two best reports to be looking at to get a sense of what’s going on in the space community,” said David Burbach, a national security affairs expert at the U.S. Such an explosion could hurl projectiles in the paths of other spacecraft and threaten the accessibility of space for everyone. Blowing up a single satellite scatters debris throughout the atmosphere, said Weeden, co-editor of the SWF report. Many of these technologies, if deployed, could ratchet up an arms race and even spark a skirmish in space, the SWF and CSIS researchers caution. The reports suggest that the biggest players in space have upgraded their military abilities, including satellite-destroying weapons and technologies that disrupt spacecraft, by, for instance, blocking data collection or transmission. Researchers at SWF and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., both released reports this year on the rapidly evolving state of affairs. That satellite joined a growing list of weapons and military systems in orbit, including those from Russia (which in April tested a missile program designed to destroy satellites) and India (which launched an anti-satellite weapon in March 2019).Įxperts like Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation (SWF), a nonpartisan think tank based in Broomfield, Colorado, worry that these developments-all confirmed by the newly rebranded United States Space Force-threaten to lift earthly conflicts to new heights and put all space activities, peaceful and military alike, at risk. On April 22, after several failed attempts, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced a successful launch of what it described as a military reconnaissance satellite.