A rising Russian rocket sloughs off what appear, at first, to be the usual pieces of second-stage debris. One Chinese satellite docks with another and rips it into graveyard orbit. A cat-and-mouse game of satellites takes a turn when one somehow cuts its speed.
Militaries don’t like surprises in any domain. These episodes on orbit during the past few years point to why U.S. space defense leaders emphasize space situational awareness as a priority, the need to pinpoint quickly where things are, where they’re going, and more importantly, why? Why did that debris start acting like a satellite? Could that Chinese tug just as easily grab another nation’s assets? Did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reveal a new capability in the cat-and-mouse game?
The level of orbital sleuthing is intensifying as spacefaring nations monitor their adversaries’ evolving space capabilities. U.S. Space Force Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, speaking at a conference in March 2025, called it “dogfighting in space.” Nothing like the air-to-air combat in Guetlein’s analogy is possible on orbit, and the “weapons” here are generally designed to gather information rather than blow one another up. But there’s one key similarity in both domains: Success is determined in large part by maneuverability.
The cat-and-mouse game is a case in point. It happened in February 2022 at 35,000 kilometers above Earth in geosynchronous orbit (GEO), the path worked by many military surveillance satellites. The Space Force’s USA 270 satellite approached from behind for a look at two Chinese satellites, Shiyan 12-01 and Shiyan 12-02, moving in tandem and launched just two months earlier.
Over the next day, the Chinese satellites moved away from each other. Shiyan 12-02 slowed and maneuvered behind USA 270, positioning itself between the sun and USA 270 to illuminate the U.S. spacecraft — creating an opportunity to record images of it. The encounter became public after drawing the attention of private space tracking firms.
How quickly a military force can detect movements in space can spell the difference between survival and loss. In September 2025, the Space Force switched to a new system to do the job — ATLAS, for Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis System. ATLAS replaces a 1980s-era predecessor that Space Force had dubbed an “old clunker” and will deliver “a timely and accurate space picture to warfighters,” according to a news release.
The stakes are high, Guetlein told the McAleese and Associates Defense Programs Conference in Arlington, Virginia, noting that the tools of modern space warfighting are being deployed more and more: “The new norms of behavior in space, unfortunately, within the past three years — jamming, spoofing, dazzling. Cyber hacks are happening all around us on a day-to-day basis.”
European security officials believe at least 17 key European satellites were shadowed or compromised by Russian spacecraft in the past three years, the website Satnews reported in February 2026. This has raised concerns that Moscow might be interested in stealing classified data from satellites or even hijacking and deorbiting them.
‘DOGFIGHTING IN SPACE’
Once pinned to a single orbit during their operational lives, surveillance satellites can now maneuver for a closer look — at friendly spacecraft and at those of their adversaries. One case in point: a February 2022 encounter involving two satellites from the Chinese Communist Party and one from the United States. Sources: COMSPOC, The Washington Post
Two experimental Chinese satellites, Shiyan 12-01 and Shiyan 12-02, were drifting westward about 35,000 kilometers above Earth near geosynchronous orbit (GEO) — the path worked by many military surveillance satellites. The remote-sensing spacecraft had launched two months earlier and were working in tandem.
The satellite USA 270, operated by the U.S. Space Force, approached from behind for a closer look at the new spacecraft. USA 270 is one of a half-dozen satellites in the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP), all with a high degree of maneuverability.
Over the next day, the Chinese satellites countered by moving away from each other. Then Shiyan 12-02 slowed and pulled up behind USA 270. Satellites in GEO normally travel at about 3 kilometers per second, so operators are careful to maintain distance — an orbital “slot” is typically 75 kilometers wide — when they approach another nation’s spacecraft.
Shiyan 12-02 positioned itself between the sun and USA 270 to illuminate the U.S. spacecraft, creating an opportunity to record images of it. In space, the sun can be blinding so surveillance satellites often maneuver to keep it behind them.
How to track
While nations work to keep their space secrets hidden, there is no legal prohibition against collecting information in the domain because space is a shared resource, noted a January 2024 article in the Australian journal Contemporary Issues in Air and Space Power. “Though lawful, such acts may still be viewed as unfriendly,” author Karina Galliford wrote. Galliford noted that satellites have sensors like aircraft but are immune from issues of airspace and sovereignty. “This means satellites can essentially spy with impunity.”
Depending on the orbit regime and the technology involved, creating orbit solutions can take from hours to days, and location accuracy can range from multiple kilometers down to tens of meters. Many systems rely on what’s known as two-line elements, or TLEs. First used in punch-card computers in the 1960s, TLEs specify the size and shape of an orbit and its Earth orientation at a point in time. What they don’t show is an object’s movement between points, which can reveal its intentions.
“You can’t see how it got from A to B. How it got from A to B is critically important,” said Paul Graziani, CEO of COMSPOC, a company that makes commercial off-the-shelf software for space situational awareness. An observer who has more information could distinguish between possibilities: “Well, that’s a station-keeping maneuver. That’s benign. I don’t have to worry about that. They’re just doing — oh, wait a minute. That’s a relocation maneuver.”
You can’t see how it got from A to B. How it got from A to B is critically important.”
~ Paul Graziani, CEO, COMSPOC
Two processes used in space situational awareness are batch least squares and the Kalman filter. Batch least squares requires many observations before producing an updated orbit solution and may not reveal changes behind a maneuver. The Kalman filter updates an orbit with each observation, enabling tracking within minutes of an observation for low-latency SDA. This provides an advantage because it better captures dynamic events like maneuvers and provides realistic uncertainty modeling. Historically, Kalman filters required a lot of computing power, leading some to accept slower, less accurate batch methods.
“The world has run on these TLEs forever because they kind of needed to,” Graziani said. “The compute power, the math wasn’t there to do the Kalman filter. That’s a massive computer science job to go figure out how you’re going to process hundreds of thousands of observations.”
This is changing as new computer systems process more data faster. COMSPOC uses the Kalman filter in its software. At its headquarters in a suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, office center, COMSPOC maintains a space domain awareness operations center that runs its commercially available software. Here, COMSPOC shares analysis with partners in government and industry, and occasionally the public, to advance understanding of orbital movements and the techniques essential to space domain awareness. Military and policy decision-makers have seen COMSPOC’s capabilities demonstrated firsthand at the operations center, including Space Force Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations.
Graziani compares space trackers who use one process versus the other. “We run 12 workflows a day, they run three. As long as nothing’s moving, everybody looks like they’re all accurate — until the moment it maneuvers. We follow the maneuver, as you can see here,” he said, tracing colored arcs on orbit on a wall-sized display monitor. “They wait for another batch.”
Ripped into GEO
Graziani recalls space defense leaders calling for quicker appraisals in 2014 after space trackers discovered that what they thought was a piece of debris from a Russian Cosmos rocket was guiding itself along precise paths toward other Russian space objects. Concern arose because Russia had not declared the object. With the object’s purpose unknown, speculation included a space junk removal device or a repair or refueling effort, the Financial Times newspaper reported then.
By the time it started maneuvering some months later, the object had been designated in the U.S. catalog as 2014-28E — one of several pieces of debris from a communications satellite launch.
Maneuverability in space is advancing all the time. Graziani singled out one operation involving the satellite Shijian-21, or SJ-21, described by the CCP as an experimental servicing satellite. In January 2022, SJ-21 moved closer and closer toward the defunct Chinese navigation satellite Compass-G2 in GEO before docking with the dead satellite and towing it away.
“It ripped it out to graveyard orbit really fast,” Graziani said. “And China said, ‘Hey, it’s just a space debris cleanup thing that we’re working.’ That’s like saying your Mach 2.5 aircraft you run at 100 feet altitude is just a business jet. It was too much tool for the job.”
SJ-21 has continued to conduct operations with other satellites, including the SJ-25 in 2025. Some observers have noted that the path of both satellites closely matches that of some U.S. spacecraft, meaning more potential cat-and-mouse approaches, SpaceNews reported.
In another notable example recently, a Chinese satellite in GEO was recorded executing a maneuver at 3,000 meters per second — “incredible,” said Douglas Loverro, a space consultant who held several military and civilian space leadership roles during his 45-year career. “Typically, we’re talking about 5 or 10 meters per second of maneuver.”
Some U.S. satellites have high maneuver capability, too, Loverro said, but they’re classified. One challenge is that maneuvering can require a lot of fuel. “You’re basically a flying gas can if you’re trying to do a maneuver that big.” Retired Space Force Lt. Gen. John Shaw said in January 2023 that U.S. surveillance satellites monitoring potentially hostile activities are at a disadvantage because of their limited maneuverability, according to media reports.
More commonly, satellites in the broad expanse in and around GEO are jockeying for position by increasing or decreasing their altitude, by shifting the shape of their orbit from circular to elliptical, and by changing their inclination — their angle relative to Earth. Satellites move at lower speeds in higher orbits, higher speeds in lower orbits.
“It doesn’t have to be much higher or much lower, let’s say a kilometer or 2,” Loverro said. “If you’re going to boost yourself to a higher orbit, then you’re going to end up moving more slowly than I am at the lower orbit. And so, I will slowly catch up to you in orbit. If you’re only a kilometer higher, it could take four or five or six or seven days for us to get even close to one another. If you’re 10 kilometers above, it may take less than a day for you to get close.”
In the end, under one common maneuver, the pursuing satellite is orbiting its target every 24 hours at an inclination to Earth different from the target in what’s known as natural motion circumnavigation. It’s a position from which it could execute a move for close observation. Such a maneuver might target a cooperative satellite, so an operator could inspect its own asset, or an uncooperative satellite operated by another nation.
Priority: analysis
The U.S. Space Command’s Space Surveillance Network (SSN) detects, tracks and catalogs objects on orbit, using ground-based sensors such as the Space Fence in the Marshall Islands and the space-based Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP). USA 270 from the cat-and-mouse game is part of GSSAP. The latest addition to SSN will focus on maneuvers in space, Loverro said — the Silent Barker constellation of satellites, a joint Space Force-National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) program now undergoing trials on orbit.
Even greater than the need for the data these sensors will produce, though, is the means to analyze it, Loverro said, echoing concerns raised by Space Force leaders. “If I had a dollar, I would spend it on analytics. I often tell people this is not an insoluble analytical problem. It’s just one we haven’t concentrated on enough.”
He sees Google’s approach with its Google Maps function as an example to emulate. “Google driving directions tell you instantaneously what the traffic is like in your area and route you around things. Google said, ‘Hey, cellphones make a great sensor. Let me absorb all this data and I will go ahead and do analytics and figure out where the slowdowns are, where the accidents are.’ So, Google only concentrated on the analytics because they didn’t need to worry about the sensors. The sensors were your phone.”
In the Pentagon, on the other hand, “We happen to like big equipment and big hardware, so we focus on the sensors and we forgot about all the analytics that have to go on in the background to use all that data. That’s what we should be focusing on.”
During his 30 years on active duty, Loverro led the U.S. Air Force’s GPS program and the NRO’s Future Imagery Program. Later, as a civilian, he held space leadership roles with the Air Force and the NRO, led human exploration for NASA and served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy in the Department of Defense, now the Department of War (DOW).
He helped identify a culture of warfighting and resilience as military space imperatives — concepts that have become policy today. One element of that resilience is the system known today as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture — hundreds of smaller satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) designed as an alternative to reliance on the large, expensive and potentially vulnerable military satellites operating in GEO.
Another element of resilience, Loverro said, is incorporating the innovation and speed of commercial space. “Having commercial companies coming in, and doing their missions, saying, ‘No, no, we’ve got it wrong.’ We need to invite them in so that it provides us with diversity that we can then use as part of our resilience strategy. And I think that has truly resonated within” the DOW.
Russian threat
When it comes to capabilities, leveraging the fast-growing number of commercial space operators offers space defense leaders “mass” — an important edge in warfighting, said Joe Callaro, COMSPOC’s director of operations. Commercial engagement offices have been opened by the Space Force, the NRO, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Defense Innovation Unit and the CIA. “Mass equates to some increase in lethality, and depending on how integrated that commercial is, it could increase lethality tremendously on the battlefield or just a small amount.”
It’s one way for the U.S. military to counter the Military-Civil Fusion mandate of the CCP, where the People’s Liberation Army can demand that its commercial space sector turn its resources toward military purposes. “For every capability that the U.S. has in the military domain, you could put together that same capability with commercial,” Callaro said, pointing as examples to some leading space situational awareness companies. “A commercial integrator could come in and say, ‘Oh, if I use LeoLabs, COMSPOC, Kratos, I could execute that same objective. So if you lose that, you can use us.’”
Leveraging commercial space operators also saves money and reduces risk, he said: “Just drive before you buy — very, very little risk of bandwidth. You have to have people test the system. But no risk of dollars.”
For the U.S., maneuvers in space are among the capabilities meant to minimize surprises and serve as a deterrent against aggression. COMSPOC’s Graziani has looked at a series of eyebrow-raising moves by Russia and theorized that they represent a campaign to deter the U.S. from deeper involvement in the war against Ukraine. Much has been written about Russia’s jamming of Ukraine’s satellite internet to cut off communications before the invasion and the Starlink system that U.S.-based SpaceX quickly stood up to replace it.
But Graziani noted that just two weeks before the start of the war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russia launched a satellite into a hard-to-track path at the outer edge of LEO. The satellite, part of a series of inspector satellites that can approach other spacecraft, later was associated with U.S. claims in May 2024 that Russia had launched a weapon into LEO capable of attacking other satellites.
Russia had shown a willingness to defy international sentiment against space weaponry when it fired a test missile from Earth in November 2021 and blew up a defunct spacecraft, creating a massive field of dangerous debris. The February 2022 launch may have been the first salvo to dissuade the U.S. from using its space assets to help Ukraine, Graziani said.
There may have been more, he said. The war still is being fought, four years later. Two other Russian satellites, Cosmos 2558, launched in August 2022, and Cosmos 2576, launched in May 2024, appear to be shadowing two satellites believed to be classified surveillance craft operated by the NRO, private space trackers told the news site Breaking Defense.
A third satellite, Cosmos 2588, was launched in May 2025 and is also shadowing a U.S. satellite, U.S. Space Command confirmed. The command called it a potential anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon, one in “a suite of counterspace systems that threaten the safety and the stability of the domain.” Private space trackers said this Russian satellite, too, was maneuvered into a position where it is co-orbital — sharing an orbital plane — with an NRO satellite, meaning it can close the gap between them with relative ease.
Space trackers can’t know the Russians’ intent for certain. But Graziani sees a pattern in their maneuvers and emphasizes the importance of assessing intent. “What am I going to do to really put pressure on the United States? I’ve got a good idea. I’m going to put up a co-orbital ASAT to trail satellites that are very rare and very expensive. And I’m going to get the United States thinking that if they cross a line with me, once I go into Ukraine, if it’s targeting my troops, nobody in the world would fault me for taking out that satellite.”
These kinds of assessments are why Graziani touts the Kalman filter. Because it can reveal the specific movements that changed an object’s orbit, the Kalman filter enables more precise pattern-of-life analysis. As he noted, the ability to determine when and how an object maneuvered is critical to understanding adversary capabilities and intent.
In the future, space is likely to be the first domain to see conflict, Graziani tells audiences in his presentations. It’s less escalatory than attacking ground, sea or air targets; direct loss of life is unlikely; and retribution is likely to be significantly less. He quotes retired Gen. John E. Hyten, head of Space Command when it was part of the Air Force: “Satellites don’t have mothers.” But with the world’s existential dependence on space assets, space presents a huge leverage point.
The likelihood of the surprise that confounds military leaders also is growing in the domain. “Threats in space are already ahead of our space domain awareness,” Graziani said. “That’s bad enough, but threats are accelerating faster than the domain awareness is improving.”