WASHINGTON—The United States, Australia and Canada have voiced concerns to China over the first known satellite-killing test in space in more than 20 years, the White House said Thursday.
"The U.S. believes 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," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said. "We and other countries have expressed our concern regarding this action to the Chinese."
Using a ground-based medium-range ballistic missile, the test knocked out an aging Chinese weather satellite about 537 miles above the earth on Jan. 11 through "kinetic impact," or by slamming into it, Johndroe said.
Canada and Australia had joined in voicing concern, he said. Britain, South Korea and Japan were expected to follow suit, an administration official added.
The last U.S. anti-satellite test took place on Sept. 13, 1985. Washington then halted such Cold War-era testing, concerned by debris that could harm civilian and military satellite operations on which the West increasingly relies for everything from pinpoint navigation to Internet access to automated teller machines.
According to David Wright of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists, the satellite pulverized by China could have broken into nearly 40,000 fragments from 1 cm to 10 cms or up to four inches, roughly half of which would stay in orbit for more than a decade.
On the day of the test, a U.S. defense official said the United States was unable to communicate with an experimental spy satellite launched last year by the Pentagon's National Reconnaissance Office. But there was no immediate indication that this was a result of the Chinese test.
Satellite-Killing Capability
Aviation Week & Space Technology, the first to report the test, cited space sources as saying a Chinese Feng Yun 1C polar orbit weather satellite, launched in 1999, was destroyed by an antisatellite system launched from or near China 's Xichang Space Center in Sichuan Province.
The capability demonstrated by China was no surprise to the Bush administration, which revised U.S. national space policy in October to assert a right to deny space access to anyone hostile to U.S. interests.
In a major speech about the policy last month, Robert Joseph, the State Department's point man for arms control and international security, said other nations and possibly terrorist groups were "acquiring capabilities to counter, attack and defeat U.S. space systems."
"No nation, no non-state actor, should be under the illusion that the United States will tolerate a denial of our right to the use of space for peaceful purposes," Joseph said on Dec. 13.
The United States has been researching satellite -killers of its own, experimenting with lasers on the ground that could disable, disrupt and destroy spacecraft.
Marco Caceres, a space expert at the Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm in Fairfax, Virginia, said China 's test could bolster a host of costly military space programs, almost all of which are over budget and behind schedule.
"They are going to use this for as much as they can," he said, referring to Pentagon officials. Major corporate beneficiaries could be Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp., which build U.S. communications, surveillance and early-warning satellites, Caceres said.
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