China, Russia Could Launch ‘Space Pearl Harbor’ on Aging US Satellites: Expert

A Long March-2F carrier rocket, carrying the Shenzhou-13 spacecraft with the second crew of three astronauts to China's new space station, lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi desert in northwest China early on Oct. 16, 2021. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

The United States is not prepared for strategic space competition against a united China and Russia, according to one expert.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is nearing technological parity with the United States in key space domains, according to Brandon Weichert, an independent geopolitical analyst. That means that it will soon threaten the United States’ ability to project power in space.

“You’re already seeing China being able to catch up to us in certain areas,” Weichert said during an Oct. 13 interview with NTD, a sister media outlet of the Epoch Times.

“They are still able to do things that we were not anticipating that they would be able to do, such as getting this new space station of theirs in orbit as quickly as they did and getting many of our key allies to sign on in support of the new China space station. And that’s just the beginning.”

Weichert said that the United States was not ready to face the combined aggression of the CCP and Vladimir Putin’s Russia simultaneously because the nation had failed to capitalize on its dominance in space following the end of the Cold War.

“We’re not ready,” Weichert said. “And the reason we’re not ready is because we have wasted the last 30 years since the Cold War ended, not advancing and not enhancing our hard-won strategic dominance in space.”

“If you merge the Russian and Chinese space power together, you now have a real challenge, not only to the United States, but to our very powerful, dynamic, private space companies.”

That means there is a developing risk, Weichert said, that CCP or Russian forces could launch a surprise attack on U.S. space assets in the event of a global conflict. Such an attack would be devastating as current U.S. satellite architecture is based on a limited number of old systems, meaning that one downed satellite could cause catastrophic consequences across multiple vital systems such as GPS or missile guidance.

“We’re in a position now where space Pearl Harbor, a surprise attack by Russia or China, or even Iran or North Korea, on our vital yet vulnerable satellite networks could happen at any moment,” Weichert said.

“And so, now, what we really need to be thinking about is not just how we prevent [that], unfortunately… [but also] how we survive it.”

Experts have long warned that the CCP poses a direct military threat to the United States in space. To remedy that, Weichert said that the Pentagon would need to hasten its adoption of a decentralized satellite architecture similar to that of Elon Musk’s Starlink. Such a system would be characterized by the deployment of numerous decentralized and inexpensive satellites, as opposed to a few vital and expensive ones.

“Basically, Musk has built hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of very small, unsophisticated satellites that he’s put into orbit and in doing so that he has basically created redundancy,” Weichert said.

“So, while those satellites may be small and unsophisticated, they’re so easy to replace that it’s hard to destroy it and, even if they are destroyed, they will be able to be replaced at relatively cheap levels.”

As such, Weichert said, the U.S. military would need to quickly adopt commercial technologies and concepts like Musk’s Starlink to its own ends.

“We need to take that model and scale it up, use it for all of our satellites system or as many as possible, and to also then make existing satellite constellations make them more interoperable with civilian satellite constellations, as well as allied constellations,” Weichert said.