Chinese ASAT

The people where I work seem to be unduly worried about the recent Chinese ASAT (anti-satellite) test. Well, not all of them. Not even most of them. Most of them don't even think about it at all, but those who mention it seem to drape it in cloaks of elaborate Maoist horror, as though they fully expect the faceless Commie hordes to come marching over the horizon at any moment.

The truth is that intercepting a satellite isn't especially difficult. If a country has the basic technology required to launch a satellite in the first place, it has all the technology it needs to intercept a satellite. Both the Soviet Union and the United States demonstrated that they could intercept satellites back in the 1980s, and both stopped doing so after a few tests because the tests tended to litter the heavens with tens of thousands of fragments of the sacrificial satellites.

In principle any spacefaring nation could intercept a satellite if it wanted to. The list of spacefaring nations includes the United States, Russia, Ukraine, the European Union, Japan, Israel, Brazil, India, and China. Even North Korea claims to have launched its own satellite, and Iran recently announced plans to launch its own satellite. Once you've got a booster that can put a payload in orbit, you've got about 90% of what you need to intercept a satellite.

Now, the Chinese test was of the so-called direct ascent type and not the simpler co-orbital type. A direct-ascent kill is harder to pull off than a co-orbital kill because you need a booster of higher performance and you need some sort of fairly precise terminal guidance system. But even so, it's not that hard. You could buy pretty much everything you need off the shelf, from booster to infrared sensor, and there are even websites where you can get the orbital elements of pretty much any satellite you're interested in so you can predict its position in the future.

So I view the successful Chinese test as a notable technical achievement, but nothing that is new or revolutionary or even all that threatening. It would have been much more threatening if we had not known about the test - if the Chinese had been able to kill the satellite without us knowing they had done it. Anyone with a big booster can kill a satellite in a messy and destructive way, but the true test of sophistication is being able to kill a satellite quietly, cleanly, and in such a way that it looks like the satellite just died on its own. And that would scare me - but of course, I wouldn't know, so it wouldn't scare me.