But one man might save us. Hail, Elon Musk! -
Communist China’s new satellite is a real-world offensive capability that can hunt and destroy American systems and render the U.S. military on earth deaf, dumb, and blind.
At one time, America was dominant in space, and American political leaders decided to go slow on developing anti-satellite weapons for fear of triggering a competition.
All that American restraint did was to allow the Chinese and Russian militaries to grab commanding leads in the race to deploy these impossible-to-defend-against delivery systems for nuclear weapons.
America is now behind China in the ability to take down satellites. The Shijian-21 satellite is a game-changer. It is a real-world offensive capability that can hunt and destroy American systems and render the U.S. military on earth deaf, dumb, and blind.
Space is the ultimate strategic high ground, conferring control of the earth. Therefore, American leaders should have known that China would try to build the capabilities to first knock the Americans out of orbit and then to place their own systems there.
America does not have a resilient space architecture.
A resilient architecture would be composed of lower-cost surveillance satellites that can be mass produced and deployed fast.
Unfortunately, the Department of Defense is still unbelievably bureaucratic and slow. So don’t count on the U.S. military, which has taken a decade to design a yet-to-be-launched survivable space network.
Fortunately, there is also Elon Musk, a bureaucracy of one. His SpaceX is building the Starlink constellation of telecommunications satellites in low-earth orbit. When complete, there will be some 42,000 satellites that can be used by the satellite-dependent U.S. military when China has crushed, lasered, shot down, or bumped out of orbit America’s military assets in space.