Space Warfare: 'US Has Already Taken Out Satellite With Missile'

This week a meeting was held in the state of Colorado in the United States for space experts to come together and talk about the future of space exploration. Some military officials spoke about the possibilities of moving warfare into space.

Radio Sputnik discussed this matter with professor David Stupples, a cyber and electronic warfare expert at City University, London.

“I think what you need to go back to, is the speech by President Putin in 2007, to say that information warfare is going to be a key part of future battles. If we understand the concept of that, we can turn and look at where the information warfare is going,” Stupples said.

He further said that what is going on in the cyberspace today was previously unheard of; such as the hacking of large corporations and attacks against organizations by penetrating into their data systems.

What is essential to understand in this scenario is that a lot of this information is managed in space.

“We have space satellites that are doing the communications; there are also satellites in space for GPS. Then there are some for the intelligence services, for weather and it goes on and on,” the expert said.

According to him, “the US has already taken out a satellite in space via attacking it with a missile from a fighter aircraft. It was a scientific satellite but it was being used for an experiment.”

He claimed that Russia and China has also done the same.

However, most of those satellites are in low orbit and the expert doesn’t think that the ones in the elliptical orbit can be taken out just yet.

Stupples further said that currently there is a great deal of experimentation going on with high energy weapons, i.e., laser weapons. However, according to him lasers won’t be able to take out satellites that are present in the outer orbit.

Looking at the repercussions such space wars can have in the future, Stupples said, “Let’s just look at the global positioning satellites and if you just start to take out those, then the navigation systems of every single airline will be impacted because the airline’s navigation is updated via the GPS satellites.”

He further said that ships also operate on the same GPS satellites and to go back to standard navigation using compasses and charts would be a retrograde step costing a lot to the world.

Most importantly, the expert noted that some of these satellites currently in space are nuclear powered and if they are destroyed they will rain down nuclear material on the planet below.