What Weapon US May Have Put In Space, Who Else Could Have Similar Arms

The United States has finally acknowledged that it has deployed weapons in space, after preaching for years about the possible weaponising of a global frontier long agreed in treaties to be used for only peaceful purposes. Washington gave away little in its announcement, with US Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink just saying the "on-orbit" weapon was necessary to safeguard US forces against hostile enemy action. 

Meink did not detail what the weapons were, how they work, or if they were targeting other objects in space or on Earth. 

The New War Frontier

America's announcement has opened a new frontier in space warfare, with analysts debating the future of military developments in orbit and who else could have similar weaponry. 

The militarisation of space is as old as the space race itself -- as soon as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957. Russia's satellite was designed to release projectiles that detonated, releasing shrapnel into the path of another (usually American) satellite.

Since then, Russia, the United States, China, and India have explored ways to fight in space outside of that treaty, including by targeting rivals' satellites, which are key for military communications, surveillance, and navigation. As warfare becomes more sophisticated, analysts fear the use of military hardware in space could increase.

What Kind Of Weapon US Might Have

Experts are also evaluating what kind of weapon the United States could have deployed in space, as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans weapons of mass destruction in orbit.

Talking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Dr Bleddyn Bowen, an associate fellow in military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute and associate professor in astropolitics at Durham University, predicted the US weapon could be "some kind of electronic warfare or radio-jamming platform; possibly, this would be a non-destructive kind of anti-satellite weapon."

He noted that such weaponry already exists on Earth and can disrupt satellite communications. "If you take out the radio links, then your satellite is very useless," he said.

Bowen, however, also did not rule out the fact that the US could have a riskier and more disruptive type of weaponry, which could create debris and destruction.

"Less likely would be a kinetic kill vehicle of some sort, so a vehicle that would release a projectile that could ram into a satellite and destroy it," he said. 

Another possibility, according to him, could be a type of "close inspection and grappling satellite."

Other Nations With Similar Weapons

Bowen pointed out that apart from the United States, Russia, China, and also India have all developed different kinds of anti-satellite or counter-space weapons in the past few years. 

"Russia and China have put a lot of technologies in space, which have a lot of weapons potential," he said. 

In fact, in the past 10 years, Moscow and Beijing have done a lot more manoeuvres in space, known as rendezvous and proximity operations (RPOs). 

Explaining these operations, Dr Rod Thornton, a reader in Russian Defence and Security Studies at King's College, London, told the BBC that, theoretically, these RPO [satellites] can become hunter-killer satellites by physically colliding with them or by nudging them out of orbit. 

Bowen noted that China has also demonstrated "space tug capability," saying, "A vehicle can go up to a satellite, can grapple it and move it into a different orbit."

This, he said, could be a positive development in a way of removing space junk. However, he noted that some types of space weaponry also have the potential to create huge amounts of space junk.

Juliana Suess, a former research fellow at RUSI and researcher at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (German Institute for International and Security Affairs), pointed out that some of Russia's outer space activity hints at being a co-orbital weapons test. 

"So we saw something that might indicate that they shot a projectile as a test in orbit. There are others out there, but without knowing the details of what the American [weapon] is, it's difficult to draw comparisons," she said.

Thornton said that what Russia lacks in space weaponry and satellites, it makes up for in missile capability.

"The Russians... have ground-based missiles which can be launched into space to strike [satellites] in low Earth orbit. They also have ASAT [air-launched antisatellite] missiles that can be launched from a great height by aircraft," he said.

Thornton added that the Russians can "also launch nuclear weapons into space and the EMP [nuclear electromagnetic pulse] blast would 'fry' any unhardened satellite over a wide expanse."