Space Forum / Shuttle / January 2007

Shouldn't be a problem since Globalist George and his Buds said we can
do business with them.
Americans are paying for the Communist Chinese advances in Military
capabilities.
I wonder if they will demand we turn over America to them to redeem all
those Dollars they hold or if they will demand the surrender of America
for the Communist cause?

Analogy: The Chinese take a shot gun to a sleeping rabbit, the FY-1C
weighs in at 950 kg and was in a sun synchronous orbit, ie an easy
target. The KH-11 is the weight of a school bus and changes its orbital
inclination and its altiutude from 150 nm to 600nm, it is designed to
avoid anti-satellite missiles, as is its brother the KH-12.

http://www.cdi.org/terrorism/satellites.cfm

The working relationships that this administration seems to have with
its "enemies" is really remarkable. If we say al Qaeda is the major
threat to the world, bin Laden drops a video saying just the same
thing; if we rip Iran for their once and future nuke, they come back
with a nyah-nyah we're going to bomb you. Now the Chinese are building
up their really awful satellite intercept so the administration can
pump for a giant laser.

January 19, 2007
Flexing Muscle, China Destroys Satellite in Test
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

China successfully carried out its first test of an antisatellite
weapon last week, signaling its resolve to play a major role in
military space activities and bringing expressions of concern from
Washington and other capitals, the Bush administration said yesterday.

Only two nations - the Soviet Union and the United States - have
previously destroyed spacecraft in antisatellite tests, most recently
the United States in the mid-1980s.

Arms control experts called the test, in which the weapon destroyed an
aging Chinese weather satellite, a troubling development that could
foreshadow an antisatellite arms race. Alternatively, however, some
experts speculated that it could precede a diplomatic effort by China
to prod the Bush administration into negotiations on a weapons ban.

White House officials said the United States and other nations, which
they did not identify, had "expressed our concern regarding this
action to the Chinese." Despite its protest, the Bush administration
has long resisted a global treaty banning such tests because it says it
needs freedom of action in space.

The weather satellite hit by the weapon had circled the globe at an
altitude of roughly 500 miles. In theory, the test means that China can
now hit American spy satellites, which orbit closer to Earth. The
satellites presumably in range of the Chinese missile include most of
the imagery satellites used for basic military reconnaissance, which
are essentially the eyes of the American intelligence community for
military movements, potential nuclear tests and even some
counterterrorism, and commercial satellites.

Experts said the weather satellite's speeding remnants could pose a
threat to other satellites for years or even decades.

In late August, President Bush authorized a new national space policy
that ignored calls for a global prohibition on such tests. The policy
said the United States would "preserve its rights, capabilities, and
freedom of action in space" and "dissuade or deter others from
either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do
so." It declared the United States would "deny, if necessary,
adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national
interests."

The Chinese test "could be a shot across the bow," said Theresa
Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, a private
group in Washington that tracks military programs. "For several
years, the Russians and Chinese have been trying to push a treaty to
ban space weapons. The concept of exhibiting a hard-power capability to
bring somebody to the negotiating table is a classic cold war
technique."

The White House statement, issued by the National Security Council,
said China's "development and testing of such weapons is
inconsistent with the spirit of cooperation that both countries aspire
to in the civil space area."

An administration official who had reviewed the intelligence about
China's test said the launching was detected by the United States in
the early evening of Jan. 11, which would have been early morning on
Jan. 12 in China. American satellites tracked the launching of the
medium-range ballistic missile, and later space radars saw the debris.

The antisatellite test was first reported late Wednesday on the Web
site of Aviation Week and Space Technology, an industry magazine. It
said intelligence agencies had yet to "complete confirmation of the
test."

The test, the magazine said, appeared to employ a ground-based
interceptor that used the sheer force of impact rather than an
exploding warhead to shatter the satellite.

The Bush administration has conducted research that critics say could
produce a powerful ground-based laser weapon that would be used against
enemy satellites.

The largely secret project, parts of which were made public through Air
Force budget documents submitted to Congress last year, appears to be
part of a wide-ranging administration effort to develop space weapons,
both defensive and offensive.

The administration's laser research is far more ambitious than a
previous effort by the Clinton administration to develop an
antisatellite laser, though the administration denies that it is an
attempt to build a laser weapon.

"There's nothing subtle about this," he said. "They've
created a huge debris cloud that will last a quarter century or more.
It's at a higher elevation than the test we did in 1985, and for that
one the last trackable debris took 17 years to clear out."

Mr. Krepon added that the administration had long argued that the world
needed no space-weapons treaty because no such arms existed and because
the last tests were two decades ago. "It seems," he said, "that
argument is no longer operative."

I saw a Japanese report that some liaison officer with the Chinese
embassy or the foreign office said he hadn't been informed. Some might
see this as a demonstration of the PLA that the "government" isn't the
only force in China. It took a week for the U.S. end of the
intelligence chain to finally get a piece of news out, " protests filed
by the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia, among others, were
met with silence - and quizzical looks from officials in The Chinese
Foreign Ministry, who seemed to be caught unaware."

"In an interview late Friday, Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush's
national security adviser, raised the possibility that China's
leaders might not have fully known what their military was doing."

January 22, 2007
U.S. Tries to Interpret China's Silence Over Test
By DAVID E. SANGER and JOSEPH KAHN

WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 - Bush administration officials said that they
had been unable to get even the most basic diplomatic response from
China after their detection of a successful test to destroy a satellite
10 days ago, and that they were uncertain whether China's top
leaders, including President Hu Jintao, were fully aware of the test or
the reaction it would engender.

In interviews over the past two days, American officials with access to
the intelligence on the test said the United States kept mum about it
in hopes that China would come forth with an explanation.

It was more than a week before the intelligence leaked out: a Chinese
missile had been launched and an aging weather satellite in its path,
more than 500 miles above the earth, had been reduced to rubble. But
protests filed by the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia, among
others, were met with silence - and quizzical looks from officials in
The Chinese Foreign Ministry, who seemed to be caught unaware.

The mysteries surrounding China's silence are reminiscent of the cold
war, when every case of muscle-flexing by competing powers was examined
for evidence of a deeper agenda.

The American officials presume that Mr. Hu was generally aware of the
missile testing program, but speculate that he may not have known the
timing of the test. China's continuing silence would appear to
suggest, at a minimum, that Mr. Hu did not anticipate a strong
international reaction, either because he had not fully prepared for
the possibility that the test would succeed, or because he did not
foresee that American intelligence on it would be shared with allies,
or leaked.

In an interview late Friday, Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush's
national security adviser, raised the possibility that China's
leaders might not have fully known what their military was doing.

"The question on something like this is, at what level in the Chinese
government are people witting, and have they approved?" Mr. Hadley
asked. He suggested that the diplomatic protests were intended, in
part, to force Mr. Hu to give some clue about China's intentions.

"It will ensure that the issue will now get ventilated at the highest
levels in China," he said, "and it will be interesting to see how
it comes out."

The threat to United States interests is clear: the test demonstrated
that China could destroy American spy satellites in low-earth orbit
(the very satellites that picked up the destruction of the Chinese
weather satellite).

Chinese military officials have extensively studied how the United
States has used satellite imagery in the Persian Gulf war, the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, and in tracking North Korea's nuclear weapons
program - an area in which there has been some limited
intelligence-sharing between Chinese and American officials. Several
senior administration officials said such studies had included
extensive analysis of how satellite surveillance could be used by the
United States in case of a crisis over Taiwan.

"This is a wake-up call," said Robert Joseph, the under secretary
of state for arms control and international security. "A small number
of states are pursuing capabilities to exploit our vulnerabilities."

As a result, officials said, the Chinese test is likely to prompt an
urgent new effort inside the Bush administration to find ways to
counter China's antisatellite technology. Among the options are
efforts to "harden" vulnerable satellites, improve their
maneuverability so that they can evade crude kinetic weapons like the
one that destroyed the Chinese satellite and develop a backup system of
replacement satellites that could be launched immediately if one in
orbit is destroyed.

American officials noted that the United States and Russia had not
conducted such tests for two decades, and that the international norm
had changed, in part because so many private satellites had been
launched by many nations. "The Chinese seem out of step on this one,
and we don't know why," one official said.

But the more immediate mystery about the destruction of the satellite
revolves around China's prolonged silence - and what it says about
the commitments President Hu and President Bush have made concerning
increasing their communication, and diminishing the secrecy around
China's military buildup.

Chinese leaders often hesitate to engage with foreign officials on
matters of military secrecy. It took days to get the Chinese to respond
in the first foreign policy crisis to confront the Bush administration
- the forcing down, on Chinese territory, of an American spy plane in
2001. Eventually the plane's crew was returned, unharmed, but the
prolonged silence unnerved American officials.

In this case, the communication blackout raised the possibility that
top Chinese officials were either trying to anger the United States or
that the test was conducted without the full involvement of the one
official who has authority to coordinate the military and civilian
bureaucracies: President Hu. American officials said they believed that
the Foreign Ministry - the one department that deals daily with the
rest of the world - was left in the dark.

"What we heard, in essence, was, 'We'll get back to you,' "
said a senior American diplomat. "It was unclear they even knew what
was going on."

Chinese political and military analysts, who would not speak on the
record about an issue the Chinese government still regards as secret,
said they considered it unlikely that the army's Second Artillery
forces, in charge of its ballistic missiles, would conduct a test of a
sophisticated new weapon without approval from the highest levels.

But they suggested that the test might have been approved in principle,
with little advance preparation for the diplomatic fallout in the event
it was successful. That entails not just new military worries; the
destruction of the weather satellite left debris in space that could
damage satellites from other nations.

"It's the kind of silence that makes you wonder what's happening
inside the country," said another senior American official who has
been monitoring the case. "I'm sure the Chinese leadership knew
there were tests under way, in a general sort of way. But they don't
seem to have been prepared for a success, and they clearly had not
thought about what they would say to the world."

The timing is significant. Chinese officials have hinted in recent
months that they are prepared to grant an American request to establish
a military-to-military hot line that may be used to enhance
communication. But China has moved slowly to establish the link, which
is based on the cold war hot line to Moscow, and there is little
evidence that Chinese military officers would have offered an
explanation for the antisatellite test if it had been set up.

President Bush and Mr. Hu hold regular phone conversations about
continuing issues, including how to manage North Korea's nuclear
program. But Mr. Hu and Mr. Bush never developed the kind of close ties
that Mr. Bush's aides forecast once the pragmatic-sounding Mr. Hu,
who is close to Mr. Bush's age, took office.

Their relationship suffered during an awkward trip by Mr. Hu to
Washington last spring, when Mr. Bush declined to hold a state dinner
for him - there was a working lunch instead - and the arrival
ceremony was marred by a mistaken announcement that the anthem that
would be played would be for the Republic of China, the formal name for
Taiwan.