General David Thompson, the US Space Force's first vice chief of space operations, warned that China's space capability could even surpass the US's within a decade
American satellites far outside the Earth's orbit are facing a near-constant barrage of threats from Russian and Chinese technology, and it's only getting worse, a top Space Force officer is warning.
An arms race in space between the US, Russia and China has been steadily heating up in recent years even as officials in Washington warn that such a build-up is dangerous.
'The threats are really growing and expanding every single day. And it’s really an evolution of activity that’s been happening for a long time,' General David Thompson told the Washington Post in a piece published on Tuesday.
Thompson is the US Space Force's first vice chief of space operations, having previously served more than three decades in the Air Force.
He warned, 'We’re really at a point now where there’s a whole host of ways that our space systems can be threatened.'
Some of the regular attacks facing the US include the use of lasers, radio frequency jamming and other cyberattacks, Thompson said.
He also revealed that a 2019 weapons test by a Russian satellite came so close to a US satellite that the military feared an imminent attack.
The general assured that when it comes to outer space technology, 'We are still the best in the world, clearly in terms of capability.'
However he said China was 'catching up quickly,' adding: 'We should be concerned by the end of this decade if we don't adapt.'
Thompson accused Russia and China of a near-constant barrage of non-kinetic attacks against the US in space
Thompson said China is sending up new satellites twice as fast as the US is managing to, and that the budding superpower is working on a system of global satellites aimed at surveilling any part of the world.
'They're fielding operational systems at an incredible rate,' he said.
For years China has reportedly been working on a satellite that could physically attack another object in space with a robotic arm or grappling hook.
In theory it could disrupt or even disable US satellites which revealed information about China's nuclear operations and the existence of Uyghur Muslim concentration camps.
'The Chinese are actually well ahead' of their Russian counterparts, Thompson claimed.
Earlier this month Russia carried out an anti-satellite weapon test, alarming the global scientific community.
Russia's anti-satellite, or ASAT, launched on November 15, and purposefully shattered the country's 4,410-pound Cosmos 1408 satellite, launched in 1982, because it was no longer operational.
The debris field created by the Russian anti-satellite test against Cosmos 1408 in LEO (low Earth orbit) causing alarm to the ISS crew, satellite operators, and spacefaring nations.
Russia blew up one of its own satellites on Monday, November 15, using a missile. Cosmos 1408, a defunct spy satellite launched in 1982, was the destroyed target, which resulted in a field of 1,500 pieces of debris endangering the crew of the ISS
According to experts, the space debris from last week's collision over the Atlantic Ocean – which included 'some 1,500 pieces of trackable size' – will cause havoc for spacecraft for years, if not decades.
Because of the impact, astronauts on the
