Speaking at a conference in Florida, officials with the United States Space Force and the space defense industry spelled out in detail how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is tracking and targeting U.S. space assets, in part by using satellites that move across orbit in a manner described as “zigzagging.”
“China doesn’t sit still. They’re all over the sky,” Clint Clark, of space awareness firm ExoAnalytic Solutions, told the Space Force Association’s Spacepower 2024 conference in Orlando. “In their strategy documents, they will tell you, whoever controls space controls the Earth.”
Maneuverable Chinese satellites crisscross geosynchronous Earth orbit to keep eyes on their U.S. counterparts, sometimes hovering atop their own satellites, grabbing them and moving them away, attendees at the December 2024 conference were told, as reported by Breaking Defense.
For the past decade, the CCP has been practicing space-based methods for challenging U.S. space capabilities, with rendezvous and proximity operations, docking and capture, characterization and inspection, as well as co-orbital and direct ascent anti-satellite weapons, said Space Force Chief Master Sgt. Ronald Lerch.
Chinese authors have openly written about imaging Space Force assets, such as the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) and the Silent Barker inspection satellites operated jointly with the National Reconnaissance Office, Lerch said. Chinese behavior has been “increasingly assertive” as their space power has grown, he said.
China’s on-orbit fleet has grown from 36 satellites in 2010 to more than 1,000 in 2024, Lerch said. This includes 292 electro-optical and 43 radar satellites for imaging targets on Earth, and 74 signals intelligence gathering satellites. At the conference, Lerch displayed slides of CCP images showing a GSSAP satellite and Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia. In addition, the CCP’s positioning, navigation and timing constellation Beidou consists of 60 satellites.
To counter the increasing threat, said Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, commander of U.S. Space Force Indo-Pacific, the service must “scale our capabilities to meet and exceed what’s required in the future, because the [CCP] is moving.”