Japanese lawmakers voted Friday to allow the military use of space, breaking a decades-old taboo in the officially pacifist country which has an increasingly ambitious space programme. The move will remove any legal obstacles to building more advanced spy satellites.
The U.S. Air Force intends to field the first system explicitly designed to help counter anti-satellite missiles and other threats, The Rapid Attack Identification Detection Reporting System (Raidrs) Block 20, which they intend for it to collect data from open and classified sources to provide predictability in the event of an ASAT attack.
If there were any doubts that the United States is preparing for war in space and cyberspace, testimony before the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee last week would have wiped them away. According to Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, head of U.S. Strategic Command, "our adversaries understand our dependence upon space-based capabilities, and we must be ready to detect, track, characterize, attribute, predict and respond to any threat to our space infrastructure."
Just hours after a Navy missile interceptor struck a dying spy satellite orbiting 130 miles over the Pacific Ocean, a senior military officer expressed high confidence early Thursday that a tank filled with toxic rocket fuel had been breached.
The US might have to delay plans to shoot down a defunct spy satellite on Thursday because of bad weather. Waves in the Pacific are too big for US warships to get into a correct position to fire a missile at the spacecraft.
Even as the United States plans a high-profile shoot-down of a wayward satellite, a new report shows Russia, China and others are gaining space market share -- aided by a U.S. policy that some say has misfired.
The State Department sent cables to all embassies yesterday instructing diplomats to explain to foreign governments how the upcoming attempt to shoot down an out-of-control spy satellite is different from China's destruction of one of its orbiting satellites early last year.
The order by President Bush for the Navy to launch an antimissile interceptor to destroy a disabled satellite before it falls from orbit carries opportunity, but also potential embarrassment, for the administration and advocates of its missile defense program.
The military will try to shoot down a crippled spy satellite in the next two weeks, senior officials said Thursday. The officials laid out a high-tech plan to intercept the satellite over the Pacific just before it tumbles uncontrollably to Earth carrying toxic fuel.
Both the U.S. and China have announced intentions of returning humans to the moon by 2020 at the earliest. And the two countries are already in the early stages of a new space race that appears to have some of the heat and skullduggery of the one between Washington and Moscow during the Cold War, when space was a proxy battleground for geopolitical dominance.