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China’s new five-year plan includes the development of stealth satellites and ground-based high-powered microwaves (HPMs) to attack allied satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), a Space Force intelligence official said on Monday.
The People’s Liberation Army and Chinese academic papers have discussed HPM testing as a cheaper way to disable proliferated LEO constellations than direct ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, Chief Master Sgt. Ron Lerch, senior enlisted advisor to the Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Intelligence, said at the annual SatShow in Washington, D.C.
There is no commercial application for the ground-based HPM–an indication that China intends to use it as a replacement for direct ascent ASAT against proliferated LEO, while retaining direct ascent ASAT for use against “large, exquisite” satellites, Lerch said.
A directed energy system can also be fired multiple times to “start to get the degradation you’re looking for with the proliferated constellation,” he said.
China has also been open about their research into stealthy satellites on orbit, Lerch said, highlighting an olive-shaped spacecraft test article introduced in 2022.
As with HPM technology, stealthy satellites offer little for commercial applications, so “they’re probably interested in the military applications of something like that,” he said.
Their stealth satellite program “has linkages to satellites that have already flown on orbit almost a decade” before the 2022 report, he said.
“So, just looking at the sort of natural evolution of the technology, it’s safe to say that this is something that they’re heavily invested into,” Lerch said.
The HPM, stealth program and the amount of orbital debris that would be created if a conflict migrates to space are major concerns, he said. If there is a conflict in space, the amount of debris created will not “magically heal itself,” Lerch said, adding, “that ecosystem will take years, decades, if not centuries to really heal from conflict in space, which is why we certainly don’t want to go there.”
