Chinese military researchers have called for the development of a "hard kill" weapon to destroy the Starlink satellite system if it threatens China's national security.
The researchers drew attention to Starlink's huge potential for military applications and the need for China to develop countermeasures to surveil, disabling or even destroy the growing satellite megaconstellation. Their paper was published in China. There is a translated copy of the paper here.
Starlink is a broadband satellite internet network developed by Musk's company that aims to beam internet access to customers anywhere in the world, as long as they have a Starlink satellite dish to connect to the satellites. Since the first Starlink satellites were launched, more than 2,300 of them have been put into low- Earth orbit, and the company plans to send up to 42,000 satellites into space to form a gigantic megaconstellation.
40 SpaceX satellites plummet to Earth.
The Chinese researchers were worried about the military capabilities of the constellation, which they claim could be used to track hypersonic missiles, dramatically boost the data transmission speeds of U.S. drones and stealth fighter jets, or even ram into and destroy Chinese satellites. China wrote to the U.N. last year complaining that the space station was forced to perform emergency maneuvers to avoid close encounters with Starlink.
The Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications, led by Ren Yuanzhen, a researcher, has proposed a combination of soft and hard kill methods to make some Starlink satellites lose their functions and destroy the constellation. Hard and soft kill are the two categories of space weapons, with hard kill including missiles and soft kill including jamming and laser weapons.
China has many methods for disabling satellites. These include cyber-weapons that can hack into satellite networks, and anti-satellite missiles that can destroy them. The researchers say that the measures will not be enough to scuttle Starlink.
The Starlink constellation is a decentralised system. The whole system is at stake in the confrontation. Some low-cost, high-efficiency measures would be required in an attack on the Starlink system.
It's not clear what these measures could be. China should build its own spy satellites to better snoop on Starlink, find new and improved ways to hack its systems, and develop more efficient methods to down multiple satellites in the network according to the researchers. The deployment of lasers, microwave weapons or smaller satellites could be used to swarm Starlink's satellites. The launch of China's own satellite network is intended to compete with Starlink. Starnet aims to provide global internet access to paying customers.
Starlink was used for military purposes before. The Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister asked Musk to send more Starlink satellites to the country. Fedorov said at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that all critical infrastructure in Ukraine uses Starlink, and that he had provided more than 12,000 satellite dishes to the country.
Musk wrote that Russia had made multiple signal-jamming and hacking attempts on Starlink. A note from the director of the Russian space agency appeared to threaten Musk, accusing him of supplying the Nazi Azov battalion with military communication equipment. If I die under mysterious circumstances, it has been nice to know.
China may be looking at other ways to counter Starlink because of the hazardous conditions created by ASAT missiles. There are many thousands of debris pieces created by the explosion that are dangerous not just on their own, but also because of their small size. Satellites have the potential to be damaged by space debris. A Russian anti-satellite missile test in November of 2016 created a debris field of at least 1,632 pieces that forced U.S. astronauts aboard the International Space Station to hide in their docked capsule.
The U.S., China, India, and Russia have all conducted ASAT tests in the past. The U.S. banned further ASAT tests in April. In October 2021, Chinese scientists claimed to have designed a way to avoid the debris problem with an explosion that could be packed inside a satellite's exhaust nozzle, and in a way that could be mistaken for a satellite.
According to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Defense, China has more than doubled the number of ISR satellites since 2019. China has 499 satellites, second only to the United States, with Starlink making up more than 2,300, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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