When US sounded alarm after China hit satellite

China’s successful destruction of an aging weather satellite about 500 miles above Earth using a missile in 2007 had alarmed the US and other countries, which saw it as a precursor to an anti-satellite arms race or an attempt by Beijing to force the then George W. Bush administration into a treaty, long resisted by the US, banning such tests.

The demonstration, detected by the US on January 11, 2007 (January 12 in China), meant that US spy satellites, which then orbited closer to Earth than the Chinese weather satellite, could be knocked out by the Chinese.

“This is the first real escalation in the weaponisation of space that we’ve seen in 20 years,” a Harvard astronomer was quoted as saying then by the New York Times. “It ends a long period of restraint.”


The satellite Feng Yun, Chinese for “Wind and Cloud”, was 4.6 cubic feet in size and had solar panels extending about 28 feet.

The US itself had last conducted a satellite kill test in the mid-1980s. The Soviets were the first to test such technology, between 1968 and 1986.

The Chinese test appeared to use a “ground-based interceptor that used the sheer force of impact rather than an exploding warhead to shatter the satellite”, NYT said.

The debris was also a worry. A scientist from the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private body, calculated the number of pieces left whizzing about Earth: 800 fragments 4 inches wide or larger, and millions of smaller pieces, NYT reported. The report also said the Bush regime had researched groundbased lasers that could destroy satellites in space.