BEIJING, 14 October 2003 — The year was 2017. Country “Brown” was under threat of attack by a more powerful East Asian neighbor, “Red”. “Blue” had to defend “Brown” in a complex stand-off involving military satellites, missiles, space planes, lasers and cyber warfare.
It was not a spage-age version of “Risk”, the game of world domination by nuclear powers, but a space war simulated by the US military in January 2001.
The United States, which was, of course, Blue, used the game to assess the need for and possible functions of new weapons such as airborne and space-based lasers, plus national and theatre missile defense (NMD and TMD) systems. Brown and Red were Taiwan and China.
Such a scenario is “possible” but “not particularly likely in the current circumstances”, Robert Karniol, Asia-Pacific editor of Jane’s Defense Weekly, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur DPA.
Those circumstances include China joining the US-led fight against global terrorism and trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear program. But China’s ruling Communist Party has a long-term political goal to gain control of Taiwan and refuses to rule out the use of force against the island it regards as a renegade province.
If China made a political decision to invade Taiwan, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would attempt to disable US military satellites about a week before an attack, British space consultant Phillip Clark said, “so that there’s no chance the Americans can replace what’s up there”.
Spy satellites are a major irritant to the Chinese military. “Just imagine there are outer space facilities of another country at the place very, very high above your head, and so others clearly see what you are doing, and what you are feeling,” Huang Chunping, commander of the Long March 2-F carrier rocket team and deputy commander of the Jiuquan space launch center, said earlier this year. “That’s why we also need to develop space technology,” the party newspaper People’s Daily quoted Huang as saying.
China is developing its own spy satellites. “They’re pursuing their capabilities vigorously,” Karniol said, though China’s spy satellites are so far “not as advanced as those in some Western countries”.
Like the United States, China is researching technology designed to disable or destroy satellites, but it is unlikely to have such capability yet, Karniol said. China’s space program also yields technology that can be used in areas such as missile guidance systems, he said.
“Any high-technology projects in China automatically have some form of military input,” said Clark, who is an expert in Chinese and Russian space systems. “It’s very difficult to say what are going to be purely military and purely civil projects,” he said. “We know that Shenzhou V is run by the Chinese military even though it’s portrayed as a civil space program.”
Previous Shenzhou orbital modules, which can remain in space for up to eight months after separation from re-entry capsules, carried electronic intelligence (ELINT) payloads, Mark Wade of Encyclopedia Astronautica said this month in an article posted on the website Space Daily.
Space Daily quoted Zhang Houying of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as saying China planned to test high-resolution imaging cameras on Shenzhou V, with a planned launch date of Oct. 15.
While some doubt remains about what exactly Shenzhou V will carry, “it may be inferred that the main mission of China’s first manned space flight will be military imaging reconnaissance”, Wade said.
China is well aware of the possible military uses of space technology such as precise carrier rocket placement and multi-modeled remote sensing, People’s Daily quoted a Chinese military strategist as saying. “In the current and future state security strategy, if one wants not to be controlled by others, one must have considerable space scientific and technological strength,” the unnamed strategist said.
China is reportedly developing a dual-use satellite launch vehicle, known as the KT-1, that is capable of “blinding” or destroying satellites in orbit. But Clark says the KT-1, a derivative of the DF-31 solid-fuel, three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile, reportedly failed to put satellites into orbit in tests in September 2002 and last month.
US space analyst James Oberg says the United States is “not frightened” by China’s progress in space technology and there is “not really a space race” like the one between the United States and the former Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. Oberg sees a potential “win-win” situation in which China joins the International Space Station (ISS), in return gaining US concessions in export controls on advanced technology.
Clark disagrees, for both technological and political reasons. “You’re more likely to see pigs looping the moon,” he says, than China joining the ISS. “I just don’t think that US politics is going to allow it.”
A more practical problem is the different orbital angles of China’s Shenzhou spacecraft and the ISS, Clark says. “I think that the Chinese have accepted all along that they’re going to be running their program independently of the International Space Station.”
In an apparent admission that China is likely to make more inroads into the United States’ supremacy in space, “Red” was described as a “near-peer competitor” in the 2001 war game.
As technological capabilities develop, it is perhaps harder to predict global political changes over the next 15 to 20 years. But it seems likely, at least in the short-term, that any “space war” will be commercial rather than military.
Even the five-day US space war game featured a bidding war between China and the United States for control of foreign commercial satellites, the Washington Post reported.
Chinese officials also insist China is committed to using space technology only for commercial, scientific and other “peaceful purposes”.
“I can tell you clearly that China, like many other countries, explores and develops space technology only for the peaceful utilization of outer space,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said last week. “China has never and will never participate in any arms race of any form in outer space.”
