U.S. sees China launch as test of anti-satellite muscle: source
By Andrea Shalal-Esa | Reuters – 1 hr 45 mins ago
By Andrea Shalal-Esa
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S.
government believes a Chinese missile launch this week was the first
test of a new interceptor that could be used to destroy a satellite in
orbit, one U.S. defense official told Reuters on Wednesday.
China launched a rocket into space on Monday but no objects were placed into orbit, the Pentagon said on Wednesday. The object re-entered Earth's atmosphere above the Indian Ocean.
"We tracked several
objects during the flight but did not observe the insertion of any
objects into orbit and no objects associated with this launch remain in
space," said Lieutenant Colonel Monica Matoush, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
The rocket reached
10,000 km (6,250 miles) above Earth, the highest suborbital launch seen
worldwide since 1976, according to Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
China has said the rocket, launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in western China, carried a science payload to study the earth's magnetosphere.
However, a U.S.
defense official said U.S. intelligence showed that the rocket could be
used in the future to carry an anti-satellite payload on a similar
trajectory. Neither the U.S. official nor the Pentagon released details of what the Chinese rocket carried into space.
"It was a ground-based missile that we believe would be
their first test of an interceptor that would be designed to go after a
satellite that's actually on orbit," said the official, who was not
authorized to speak on the record.
Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the U.S. House
Intelligence Committee, declined to comment specifically on the rocket
launch, but said China was clearly taking a more aggressive posture in
space.
"Any time you have a nation-state looking to have a
more aggressive posture in space, it's very concerning," Rogers said at a
Reuters Cybersecurity Summit.
The United States remains concerned about China's
development of anti-satellite capabilities after Beijing shot a missile
at one of its own defunct satellites in orbit in 2007, creating an
enormous amount of debris in space.
Monday's rocket launch
was similar to launches using the Blue Scout Junior rocket that were
conducted by the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s for research on Earth's
magnetosphere, McDowell said in an emailed response to questions.
He said all the previous suborbital launches above
10,000 km (6,250 miles) had been conducted by the United States. All
China's previous missile tests went to less than 2,000 km (1,250 miles),
although Beijing had launched orbital vehicles higher, including to the
Moon, he said.
Most scientific suborbital launches are at most 1,500
km (940 miles) or so, McDowell added. The 1976 launch was Gravity Probe
A, when NASA and McDowell's institute worked together to launch an
atomic clock to 10,280 km (6,425 miles).
Monday's launch came less than a week after U.S. Deputy
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter unveiled what he called a "long
overdue" effort to safeguard U.S. national security satellites and
develop ways to counter the space capabilities of potential adversaries.
U.S. military space officials are taking steps to
improve the resilience of national security satellites in orbit, the
defense official said. These include using new wave forms to make it
more difficult for adversaries to jam signals from space, putting U.S.
sensors on commercial satellites and using terrestrial high-frequency
communications.
Last week, the Pentagon released an 83-page report on
Chinese military developments that highlighted China's increasing space
capabilities and said Beijing was pursuing a variety of activities aimed
at preventing its adversaries from using space-based assets during a
crisis.
(Reporting By Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by David Brunnstrom and Cynthia Osterman)
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U.S. sees China launch as test of anti-satellite muscle: source
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