Satellite Stir-Fry

Here is a piece in the Federalist Patriot about China`s spiffy satellite killer making stir fry out in space:

New revelations on Chinese ASAT test
Citing the successful test of a Chinese direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) system on 11 January, Republicans from the House Armed Services Committee are now pushing for more spending on classified space programs. That’s promising because, China’s ``peaceful use of space`` rhetoric notwithstanding, the test betrays China’s aggressive pursuit of counter-space weapons.

That pursuit has merit. U.S. military forces depend on the asymmetric capabilities of space to such an extent that the question, Can the U.S. win a major conflict without space? is no longer seriously debated in military academia. China rightfully sees this capability as an Achilles’ heel it must zealously exploit if it is to satisfy its quest for regional hegemony.

Now challenging U.S. space supremacy may be easier than previously believed. That’s because one result of China’s test is the introduction of a semi-permanent, global ``frag cloud`` in Earth’s lower orbit. Many experts believe one motivation behind the Chinese test was not only to hit the satellite target, but to study the debris that it left behind. China’s newly minted ``frag cloud`` equates to space-borne anti-aircraft rounds with each fragment traveling on the order of 10 miles per second. Already, the International Space Station has had to maneuver to avoid collision and, next time, intelligence or military communications satellites would constitute even easier targets. Now the frag pattern is spreading from its original single polar orbit into a shell, more-or-less uniformly distributed about the Earth at roughly the impact altitude, potentially doubling the amount of trackable space trash previously orbiting the planet.

That brings us to Taiwan, which the U.S. has pledged to defend from attack by China. While an unprovoked attack by China is improbable, should Taiwan declare independence, China would undoubtedly intervene. Such a declaration is not unlikely, given past overtures by independence-minded Taiwanese President Chen Shui-Bian. Besides technical validation, then, a probable political goal of the ASAT test is to put the U.S. on notice of the costs of intervening in a China-Taiwan conflict. Beijing knows that if U.S. decision makers can be convinced that the costs of standing up to bat for Taiwan are too high, China can have Taiwan without firing a single shot.

Unfortunately, collateral effects of the ASAT test might have already become apparent. According to a Reuters report, the National Reconnaissance Office lost contact with one of its satellites the day the ASAT launched an unlikely coincidence.