With a U.S. ailing spy satellite being put out of its misery two days ago (Feb. 20th, 07:26 PST) by the U.S. Navy, comes a new source of confrontation between the U.S. and China, just a matter of a few days since Steven Spielberg resigned as an artistic director of the Beijing Olympics in protest at China’s multi-faceted involvement in Sudan.
The U.S. has claimed that it shot down its own satellite with its own missile – at a cost of just over $30 million – to protect earth-dwellers from an out-of-control piece of space junk loaded with “toxic fuel†potentially burning through the atmosphere and slamming into a remote village in rural Peru, or somesuch place.
It might also be down to the fact that it would be awfully embarrassing if the satellite hit terre ferme, smashing into thousands of salvageable pieces which would then be sold on eBay by our theoretical rural Peruvian friends, and possibly yielding valuable military secrets.
Image: Pentagon spokesman James Cartwright charts the missile’s path into the satellite’s fuel tanks. The video (BBC news) on Youtube is here.
When China did precisely the same thing in January 2007, to one of its own weather satellites, it should come as no surprise that it was the U.S. who got most high-and-mighty in their condemnation of China’s actions, claiming that Beijing’s pot-shot at their own ailing satellite was nothing more than a bit of target practice for taking out a swathe America’s military GPS satellites which orbit at reachably low levels.
Speaking in January 2007 about the Chinese shoot-down, President George W. Bush’s flying monkey spokesperson, Tony Snow said, “We are aware of it and we are concerned, and we made it known.†Time magazine, meanwhile, worded it more entertainingly, describing the space blast as a “James Bond-style exerciseâ€.
Japan, too, was massively irked by China’s aiming and shooting, saying (via Chief Cabinet Secretary Yashuhia Shiozaki), “Naturally, we are concerned about it from the viewpoint of security as well as peaceful use of space.â€
Now, unsurprisingly, Beijing is accusing Washington of double-standards and is calling for more open information on why the U.S. opted to do something that it had condemned just 13 months previously, and to reveal some of the data garnered from the operation. Russia, meanwhile, slammed the missile strike as a thinly-veiled arms test.
Thus, space has become a bone of contention between the the U.S and it’s emerging adversaries, China and Russia, to add to other disputes in the realms of oil, industrial espionage, foreign policy in Africa, and other geopolitical tussles.
Russia and China have recently been aiming to sign up all space-involved nations to an agreement on the demilitarisation of space, although that somewhat overlooks who first decided to launch a missile into space, in the manner of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.
So this week, space – for the first time – has become an overtly militarised place, with two of space’s key participants now having blasted some floating metal up in the black, starry yonder. Next up, I fear, will be Russia, who will decide that they need to do something very similar for their own sweet reasons, and so space will become a cold, dark playground of schoolboy stubbornness and willfulness.
But it’s all just a duck hunt until the blast-tastic day when one country takes out another country’s satellite. That’ll be the day when sparks truly fly in space.
To point out my observation, I believe the difference between these two events was the altitude of the Chinese satellite. The Americans waited until now, when the spy satellite was in a low enough Earth orbit that it was soon to come crashing through the atmosphere. As far as I am aware, the Chinese satellite that was destroyed is still up there, creating a massive swarm of space junk and is posing a risk to other satellites in orbit. Whereas the Chinese were simply testing a new weapon on an old decommissioned satellite, the Americans are able to pretend that out of the safety of the world they had to destroy their failed spy satellite. Personally I think they just wanted to make sure nothing survived reentry and fall into the hands of the other side. Perhaps there is a double standard but all this grandstanding by both sides is just the status quo.
Bernard’s right. We shouldn’t forget the differences between the two situations. I’m willing to accept the contention that the American shot was a weapons-test-in-disguise, but the Chinese shot was definitely a weapons test and carried out in secret, and that, as Bernard writes, it made space a more dangerous place in more ways than one.
I think there are more similarities than differences between these two events.
The fact that the Chinese did it recklessly with little concern to the dangers they were causing down the road for other satellites, and that the US was a bit more suave with the PR of it all says nothing about the motivation behind the tests – rather, only who’s had more experience with such things.
Indeed, China’s shoot-down was done with no concern for the debris that would be left out there; and so a lot of orbits are no longer viable because of their space junk. The US, at least, intended to sweep up after them, and so all of this week’s junk has been vaporized in the atmosphere.
Still… The U.S. did what it strongly condemned last year, accompanied by the appearance of propriety in the form of a press conference and a video. Nice PR indeed. Sure, China should have tried to be more open if they wanted to avoid the appearance of simply doing target practice. As one commenter on the YouTube video demanded: “Show me China’s video [of their satellite being taken down].”
Hah, space has always been overtly (or at least, covertly) militarized — from the very beginning, when the USSR launched Sputnik, the main reason for the hysterical US reaction was that people recognized that rockets that launch satellites could just as easily be used to launch ICBMs.
“The space race” between the USSR and the US was just a proxy for the arms race, as is the current situation between China and the US. Like it or not, another arms race (or call it cold war, if you want) is already upon us, and has been for a while.