China’s public statements do not describe military intentions in the space as bluntly as the US – Beijing’s 2022 white paper on its space program emphasizes the country’s peaceful approach. But papers by PLA-affiliated scientists reveal research and development in many technologies needed for military operations in space. PLA textbooks also go into shocking detail about how China can fight orbital war.
A doctrine built on vulnerability
Fears about the use of space weapons can be traced back to the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1950s, which travel through space on their way to their destination. the target.
Since 1996, General Joseph Ashy, former commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the Air Force Space Command, said: “It is politically sensitive, but it will happen. . . . we will fight in space.”
For the past three decades, the US and China have been in a race to prepare for such a conflict. Both are motivated by the fear that a single strike in space could shut down the central nervous system of their economy and military. depend on.
Telecommunications, power grids, navigation systems and financial markets will all collapse without the signals transmitted by satellites. Equally, modern militaries rely heavily on space for command and control, communications and missile targeting.
Under the US concept of Joint All-Domain Command and Control, data from sensors across the nation’s forces must be shared through a single network, with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites playing a key role. That raises the risk that a targeted strike could cripple its surveillance as well command systems.
Howard Wang, a researcher at the Washington-based think tank, Rand, says that the main idea of the PLA strategy is to hit key points in the enemy’s network in order to “paralyze” decision-making along the entire chain, from data collection and transmission to analysis and operations. in it.
China’s drive to build up its military capabilities in space also stems from a sense of threat. The country’s space program is an attempt to counter what it sees as US military advantage in this domain, even as it modernizes and expands its nuclear arsenal in part out of fear that it could be removed by the US. missile defense.
In a 2021 presentation to the UN, the Chinese government said that the “weapons” of space and the arms race in orbit are “very prominent and pressing”. It accused “some countries” of pursuing military superiority in space and said the US was accelerating “the creation of a space warfare program with the aim of being ready for space warfare”.
China has been developing its capabilities to answer.
In January 2022, China’s Shijian-21 satellite – officially launched to test debris removal capabilities – used a robotic arm to pull a defunct Beidou navigation satellite into orbit. US generals are shocked by Beijing’s ability to take a satellite into geostationary orbit (GEO) – about 36,000km from Earth – and throw it a few hundred kilometers away. above that.
A year later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the US warned that such displays “prove China’s ability to use future space-based weapons”.
In 2024, five Chinese research satellites, three of the Shiyan-24C type and two others called the Shijian-6 05A and B, made a series of very close approaches – a behavior the US likened to dogfighting.
Data from Comspoc, a space analysis company, shows another test in June, when two Chinese satellites took part in a GEO “collaboration mission” that may have been the first its kind.
