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Space, the final frontier of war?

The USA just admitted that it has done a bit of waring in space.

Should we be worried?

For a long time, space was considered to be a neutral zone. It was okay to use it to gather intelligence and spy on your adversaries but no nation admitted to actually placing weapons into orbit.

Over the years we have seen some signs of the weaponisation of space, with both China and the USA blowing up satellites using kinetic weapons.

According to Wikipedia "On 13 September 1985, Wilbert D. "Doug" Pearson, flying the "Celestial Eagle" F-15A 76-0084 launched an ASM-135 ASAT about 320 kilometres (200 mi) west of Vandenberg Air Force Base and destroyed the Solwind P78-1 satellite flying at an altitude of 555 kilometres (345 mi)"

The USA would argue that although this missile was used in space, against a satellite, it didn't have weapons actually in orbit.

For its part, China has also used missile technology to hit satellites.

More recently, China has boasted a directed energy weapon that uses 20GW of pulsed energy with the potential to disrupt orbiting satellites. (reference).

It's fair to say that most people with half a brain would have already twigged that the USA has weapons in orbit, especially after the USAF's X-37B space plane made the headlines over a decade ago.

This week however, the USA confirmed that it had deployed a weapon in space, the first time it has made such an acknowledgement.

The smart money is backing claims that it may have used this weapon to disrupt or destroy the statellite or satellites that were being used to feed Iranians with important targeting information while they have been attacking US bases in the Middle East. This would mean that the satellites hit would likely have been Russian or Chinese.

There has been no word from either China or Russia in respect to any satellite losses or distruption to confirm those suggestions.

From where I sit, this is a saddening deterioration of the world. Earth orbit has essentially been a demilitarized zone where the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 saw signatories agree not to station nuclear weapons in orbit. What a shame that treaty didn't simply declare space to be a neutral zone where no weapons of any kind were allowed.

I suspect we'll now see an hysterical paranoia-driven escalation of the arming of earth orbit. Every space-capable nation will now be preparing to defend itself from space and inevitably that will bring us closer to a conflict that may well toss us all back to the iron age.

Only AI can save us now <-- sarcasm.

Carpe Diem folks!

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