Chinese missile destroys satellite in space

Britain has joined the US, Japan and Australia's condemnation of China after the communist country destroyed a satellite in space using a ballistic missile.

The British embassy in Beijing said it had raised the test, the first of its kind for 20 years, with the Chinese foreign ministry noting that the Government believed it was “inconsistent” with China's opposition to the development of space weapons.

A spokesman refused to elaborate on the form the protest took or on the Chinese government's response.

Later, a Downing Street spokesman said: "We are concerned about the impact of debris in space and we expressed that concern.

"We don't believe that this does contravene international law.

"What we are concerned about however is lack of consultation and we believe that this development of this technology and the manner in which this test was conducted is inconsistent with the spirit of China's statements to the UN and other bodies on the military use of space."

The Chinese authorities have not confirmed a US report that it blew up one of its own aged weather satellites last Thursday with a ballistic missile fired from the Xichang space centre in Sichuan province.

There is stony silence on the subject in the Chinese media today as concern grows in the US and in the region about the prospect of an arms race in space.

If the test is confirmed, China will become the third country after the United States and the former Soviet Union to shoot down an object in space, indicating the Asian power could target satellites operated by other nations.

The United States, Japan, Australia and a host of other countries voiced concern on Friday .

Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Yasuhisa Shiozaki, said his government had asked China for confirmation, and for an explanation of what its intentions were.

“We are concerned about it firstly from the point of view of peaceful use of space, and secondly from the safety perspective,” Mr Shiozaki said.

Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the American National Security Council, said the US “believes China's development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of co-operation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area”.

Alexander Downer, Australia's foreign minister, said his country did not want to see “some sort of spread, if you like, of an arms race into outer space”.

Taro Aso, the Japanese foreign minister, said the Chinese had sought to reassure Japan its intentions in space were of no threat to anyone.

“China consistently uses space only for peaceful purposes,” Mr Aso quoted the Chinese foreign ministry as saying.

The comments fit with the ruling Communist Party's mantra in recent years that the nation's rise as a world superpower should not be feared.

China joined the exclusive club of top space nations in 2003 when it sent up its first manned mission, joining the United States and Russia.

China spends 500 million dollars a year on its space programmes, according to official figures, while NASA's proposed budget for 2007 is nearly 17 billion dollars.

But the United States has consistently deflected Chinese advances for closer cooperation on the two nations' space programmes because of concerns about the involvement of China's military.

A Chinese government defence paper released last month said that its defence expenditure had grown by more than 15 percent every year since 1990.

China Tests Anti-Satellite Weapon, Unnerving U.S.

China successfully carried out its first test of an anti-satellite weapon last week, signaling its resolve to play a major role in military space activities and bringing expressions of concern from Washington and other capitals, the Bush administration said Thursday.

Only two nations — Russia and the United States — have previously destroyed spacecraft in anti-satellite tests, most recently the United States in the mid 1980s.

Arms control experts called the test, in which a Chinese missile destroyed an aging Chinese weather satellite, a troubling development that could foreshadow either an anti-satellite arms race or, alternatively, a diplomatic push by China to force the Bush administration into negotiations on a weapons ban.

“This is the first real escalation in the weaponization of space that we've seen in 20 years,” said Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks rocket launchings and space activity. “It ends a long period of restraint.”

White House officials said the United States and other nations, which they did not name, had “expressed our concern regarding this action to the Chinese.” Despite its protest, the Bush administration has long resisted a global treaty banning such tests because it says it needs freedom of action in space.

At a time when China is modernizing its nuclear weapons, expanding the reach of its navy and sending astronauts into orbit for the first time, the test appears to mark a new sphere of technical and military competition. American officials complained today that China made no public or private announcements about its test, despite repeated requests by American officials for more openness about their actions.

The weather satellite hit by the missile circled the globe at an altitude of roughly 500 miles. In theory, the test means that China can now hit American spy satellites, which orbit closer to Earth than that. Experts said remnants of the destroyed satellite could threaten to damage or destroy other satellites for years or even decades to come.

In late August, President Bush authorized a new national space policy that ignored calls for a global prohibition on such tests and asserted the need for American “freedom of action in space.”

“It could be a shot across the bow,” said Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, a private group in Washington that tracks military programs. “For several years, the Russians and Chinese have been trying to push a treaty to ban space weapons. The concept of exhibiting a hard-power capability to bring somebody to the negotiating table is a classic cold war technique.”

Gary Samore, the director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a proliferation expert, said in an interview: “I think it makes perfect sense for the Chinese to do this both for deterrence and to hedge their bets. It puts pressure on the U.S. to negotiate agreements not to weaponize space.”

Ms. Hitchens and other critics have accused the Bush administration of conducting secret research on advanced anti-satellite weapons using lasers, which are considered a far speedier and more powerful way of destroying satellites than the cruder weapons of two decades ago.

The White House statement, issued by the National Security Council , said China's “development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of cooperation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area.”

An administration official who had reviewed the intelligence about China's test said the Chinese missile launch was detected by the United States in the early evening of Jan. 11, which would have been early morning on Jan. 12 in China. American satellites tracked the launch of the medium-range ballistic missile, and later space radars saw the debris and noted that the old weather satellite had vanished.

The anti-satellite test was first reported late Wednesday on the Web site of Aviation Week and Space Technology, an industry magazine. It said intelligence agencies had yet to “complete confirmation of the test.”

The Chinese test, the magazine said, appeared to employ a ground-based interceptor that used the sheer force of impact rather than an exploding warhead to shatter the satellite into a cloud of debris.

Dr. McDowell of Harvard, who twice monthly publishes "Jonathan's Space Report," an e-mail newsletter, said the satellite is known as Feng Yun, or “wind and cloud.” Launched in 1999, it was the third in a series. He said the satellite was a cube measuring 4.6 feet on a side, and that its solar panels extended about 28 feet. He added that it was due for retirement sometime soon but still appeared to be electronically alive — making it an ideal target.

“If it stops working,” he said, “you know you have a successful hit.”

David C. Wright, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists , a private group in Cambridge, Mass., said he calculated that the Chinese satellite shattered into 800 fragments that were 4 inches wide or larger, and millions of smaller pieces.

Jianhua Li, a spokesman at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said he had heard about the anti-satellite report but had no statement or information.

The Soviet Union conducted roughly a dozen anti-satellite tests between 1968 and 1982, Dr. McDowell said, adding that the Reagan administration carried out its experiments in 1985 and 1986.

The Bush administration has conducted laser research that critics say could produce a powerful ground-based laser weapon that would use beams of concentrated light to destroy enemy satellites in orbit.

The largely secret project, parts of which were made public through Air Force budget documents submitted to Congress last year, appears to be part of a wide-ranging effort by the Bush administration to develop space weapons, both defensive and offensive. No treaty or law forbids such work.

The administration's laser research is far more ambitious than a previous effort by the Clinton administration nearly a decade ago to develop an anti-satellite laser. It would take advantage of an optical technique that uses sensors, computers and flexible mirrors to counteract the atmospheric turbulence that seems to make stars twinkle. The weapon would essentially reverse that process, shooting focused beams of light upward with great clarity and force.

Michael Krepon, cofounder of the Washington-based Henry L. Stimson Center, a private group that studies national security, called the Chinese test very un-Chinese.

“There's nothing subtle about this,” he said. “They've created a huge debris cloud that will last a quarter century or more. It's at a higher elevation than the test we did in 1985, and for that one the last trackable debris took 17 years to clear out.”

Mr. Krepon added that the administration has long argued that the world needs no space-weapons treaty because no such arms exist and because the last tests were two decades ago. “It seems,” he said, “that argument is no longer operative.”

China anti-satellite test sparks space junk outcry

AFP | January 19, 2007

China's test of an anti-satellite weapon has sparked concerns that the trial had caused dangerous debris to scatter into orbit, potentially threatening commercial and military satellites of other nations.

The website space.com, quoting sources that it did not identify, said the January 1 strike against the old Chinese weather satellite had caused it to smash up into "hundreds of pieces, fluttering through low Earth orbit."

"The mess of space junk does put other satellites, including the International Space Station, at some risk," space.com's Leonard David said, adding though that the chances of a strike were "very small."

The main repercussion of the Chinese test has been fears of an arms race in space -- but debris is another big source of concern.

The space age reaches 50 years on October 4 this year -- the anniversary of the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik -- and there are hundreds of thousands of pieces whirling in orbit, the result mainly of exploded rocket stages and broken-up satellites.

David Wright, co-director of the Global Security Programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a US private advocacy group, said the satellite that was destroyed had a mass of 750 kilogrammes (1,650 pounds) and was orbiting at an altitude of 850 kilometers (520 miles).

Many commercial, military and navigational satellites orbit in the region of 900 kilometers (560 miles), he said. The maximum altitude of the International Space Station is around 450 kilometers (280 miles).

"The collision would be expected to completely fragment the satellite into millions of pieces of debris -- nearly 800 debris fragments of size 10 centimeters (four inches) or larger, nearly 40,000 debris fragments with size between one and 10 centimeters (half to four inches) and some two million fragments of size one millimeter (0.04 inch) or larger," said Wright.

"At the very high speeds these debris particles would have, particles as small as one millimeter (0.04 inch) can be very destructive."

Most satellites do not carry sufficient shielding for even tiny particles like this, and in any case shielding is ineffective against any debris larger than about one centimetre (half an inch) in size," said Wright in a statement.

The orbital region "is very heavily used by satellites for both civil and military uses, which are threatened by the added debris," he warned

Among those who voiced fears was Australia, which said on Friday that, in addition to worries about the militarisation of space, "we're concerned about the impact that debris from destroyed satellites could have on other satellites, which are very expensive pieces of equipment."

The danger from debris comes from the enormous speeds at which they travel, which means even very small pieces impact with high energy.

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