Military experts are describing a “space Pearl Harbor”—a sneak attack on U.S. satellites that cripples American forces before a shot has been fired—that has Pentagon planners seriously worried. Space is the ultimate high ground for today’s warriors, and no military has dominated those strategic heights as successfully as America’s.
But its constellations of GPS, surveillance and communications satellites are largely undefended, a vulnerability that hasn’t escaped notice in China and Russia. The result: a new three-way space race—the first since the end of the Cold War, and one that now includes the development of weapons to knock out the other side’s space assets.
The Pentagon says that Beijing continues to ramp up its military capabilities in space, launching 142 satellites to provide intelligence, navigation, communications and weather forecasting that can “limit or prevent the use of space-based assets by adversaries during times of crisis or conflict.”
They also say China has been developing and testing anti-satellite weapons that can go high enough to take out U.S. GPS satellites and reaching the military’s early-warning satellites that hang in geostationary orbit 22,000 miles above the Earth.