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A space race with Russia and China may seem like a concern of the 20th century, not the 21st. It has been decades since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I and Americans landed on the moon. In that time, the Berlin Wall has fallen, the Soviet Union has dissolved, and China has become one of the United States' largest trading partners.
Nevertheless, a space race born from the Cold War continues to unfold. While the current space race may not have the same monopoly on the American imagination as the sprint to the moon during the 1950s and 60s, it deserves our equal attention. We are now witnessing the rapid and increasingly international development of anti-satellite weapons. The race for these weapons not only increases the risk of global conflict-it could jeopardize all future space exploration.
What are Anti-Satellite Weapons (ASATs)?
Difficult to define, ASATs occupy a gray zone in international arms control. On one level, they are exactly what the term suggests: weapons designed to destroy or limit satellites for military purposes, such as undermining the command and control centers of an adversary's military. ASATs can function in several ways. For example, kinetic energy ASATs (KE-ASATs) destroy satellites by physically colliding with them at high velocities. Drones, ballistic missiles, and explosives detonated near satellites can all function as KE-ASATs.
Non-kinetic ASATs, by contrast, use any non-physical mechanism to render a satellite inoperative, such as blinding satellites with lasers, launching cyberattacks, or jamming frequencies.
But definitional issues arise because any technology that can physically or non-kinetically damage a satellite can be considered an ASAT weapon. For example, supposedly benign technology aimed at removing defunct satellites or other space junk-known as Active Debris Removal (ADR) technology- can also remove active satellites. With ostensibly civil but covertly military capabilities or functions, many space technologies, including ADR, are put in a category commonly known as "dual-use." The dual-use nature of space infrastructure makes differentiating between weapon and non-weapon nearly impossible. As a result, regulating ASATs-and many other spacebased weapons systems-is extremely difficult.
A Brief History of ASAT Proliferation
The earliest ASAT testing began during the Cold War, when the success of Sputnik I in October of 1957 catalyzed American fears about the Soviet Union's potential goal of developing...