Watch out, American warships
launched the Yaogan-41 satellite into space late last year, it travelled further than most such objects. Reconnaissance satellites tend to sit in low-Earth orbit , whizzing around the planet between 11 and 16 times a day . But Yaogan-41 headed for higher ground, some 36,000km from the Earth. There, in geostationary orbit , the point at which a satellite circles the planet slowly enough to remain above the same point, it began watching.
The launch of the Yaogan-41 is part of a larger Chinese push into the cosmos. China spends more on its space programme than any country bar America. In 2019 China landed a rover on the far side of the moon. Two years later it deployed one on Mars. Those efforts seem innocuous enough, but much of its activity has potential strategic value. An area of particular concern is satellites.
But this is all harder in practice than in theory. Even America is struggling to build a battle network which can shunt data seamlessly from satellites to ships to guns. On the Chinese side, satellites like Yaogan-41 would probably still find it hard to locate and track a warship in the middle of the ocean with enough precision to enable a strike. And there is a lack of agility in the chain of command, meaning good intelligence may not get to the right people at the right time.
China, though, is moving forward. In the past it invested heavily in counter-space weapons which could blind or destroy the satellites that America’s armed forces depend on to see, communicate and fight. Now it is on a path to recreating America’s vast and sophisticated network of capabilities in the cosmos. As it catches up, it will become increasingly exposed to the same sort of satellite-killing strategies with which thehas long threatened America.
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