China challenges US: advancing at ‘breathtaking speed’ towards space supremacy

Generals and experts note that American supremacy is under threat

China is expanding its space capabilities at an impressive pace as it seeks to challenge the United States’ long-standing dominance in the “final frontier,” US officials say.

US supremacy was established in 1969 when NASA’s Apollo 11 spacecraft landed on the moon and ended the Cold War space race with the USSR. This lunar achievement had lasting consequences: the unprecedented space resources of the United States of America gave the nation’s military a powerful advantage for decades, providing information-gathering and communications capabilities that other countries could not match.

However, China is now intent on challenging the space leader, as US officials have repeatedly indicated over the past few years, including now.

“Frankly, China is developing at a breathtaking pace. Since 2018, China has more than tripled the number of its satellites in orbit,” said Gen. J. Stephen Whiting, commander of the U.S. Space Command, at a space symposium in April 2024.

According to Whiting, China has also “developed a range of counter-space weapons, from reversible jammers to kinetic direct-ascent weapons and co-orbital spacecraft.”

Let us recall that China demonstrated the technology of creating anti-satellite weapons with direct climb back in January 2007, when it destroyed one of the meteorological satellites with a missile. The test was widely condemned as irresponsible because it produced thousands of pieces of debris, many of which still litter Earth’s orbit today.

Whiting argues that such actions show that China now views space as a warfighting domain.

“We are at a turning point in history,” said Troy Maink, Principal Deputy Director of the National Reconnaissance Office. “For the first time in decades, U.S. leadership in space and space technology is being challenged.”

Both officials stressed that the United States must act if it is to meet this challenge and that it cannot rely on the inertia of past successes to get the job done.

For example, Meink noted the need to innovate the nation’s reconnaissance satellites to make them more numerous, more flexible, and more resilient.

Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shew echoed her colleagues and spoke about the importance of increasing sustainability, a goal that she said can be achieved by diversifying the country’s space capabilities.

The general idea of ​​space confrontation, according to the general, is the same as it was: “In fact, space was born in conditions of competition between great powers. In 1957, the Soviet Union won the first victory in the space race, launching the first object, the first man and the first woman, and this certainly caused a crisis of confidence here in the United States.”