America is losing its lead in the space race as other countries challenge its dominance on the “final frontier”, the head of Nasa has warned.
The more obvious rivals such as Russia and Europe have been joined by countries as diverse as Brazil, Israel and India, which are all launching their own space programmes.
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Every year the Pentagon produces a report on Chinese military capabilities called Military Power of the People’s Republic of China. Every year the media covers the release of the report with the same amount of surprise as the sheep that is startled to discover the sun rising in the East each morning—alarmed at data that [...]

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Japan’s estrangement from its postwar pacifism continued today with the enactment of a law ending its 40-year ban on the military use of space.
The law signals Tokyo’s determination to expand its military capability amid concern over China’s ballooning defence budget and North Korea’s development of ballistic and nuclear missiles.
The move will be welcomed by the [...]

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“This is a major change in Japanese space policy,” says space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University in Washington, DC, US.
For many years, scientists and engineers have run the country’s space programme for their own purposes. Logsdon told New Scientist that the change will “allow Japan to carry out military programmes as long [...]

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Now it seems that the immediate impact of a space war, at least on the US military, would be limited. “We have built up such high redundancy to space assets that we’re almost invulnerable,” says Geoff Forden of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who assessed the risk posed by China to the US. He found [...]

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When the United States recently shot apart a crippled spy satellite over the Pacific Ocean, it also tested an offensive anti-satellite weapon and the potential for ballistic missile defense. “The shot,” as the Pentagon called the $100 million operation conducted on February 20, came immediately after Russia and China put forward a detailed, but flawed, [...]

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The trouble is, Baikonur is in Kazakhstan, not Russia. That didn’t matter at all in Soviet times, but since the breakup of the Soviet Union, it has meant continuing friction between the Russian space program and a host government that the Kremlin can no longer order around on a whim — not to mention that [...]

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China’s evolving space development should be closely watched for its potential impact on the country’s military buildup, a Japanese Defense Ministry think tank report said Thursday.
“It is likely that China will continue to actively engage in space development in the years ahead, given that such development serves as a vital means of achieving military competitiveness [...]

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According to U.S. officials, the shooting down of their satellite took place at a low orbit, meaning the resultant cloud of debris would mostly fall into the atmosphere and burn up. The Chinese anti-satellite missile left a cloud of debris in a higher orbit.
Analysts worry that that the U.S. move might provide other nations an [...]

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It does not take much imagination to realize how badly war in space could unfold. An enemy - say, China in a confrontation over Taiwan, or Iran staring down America over the Iranian nuclear program - could knock out the U.S. satellite system in a barrage of antisatellite weapons, instantly paralyzing American troops, planes and [...]

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NASA is facing the prospect of trying to explore deep space without the aid of the long-lasting nuclear batteries it has relied upon for decades to send spacecraft to destinations where sunlight is in short supply.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin told a House Appropriations subcommittee March 5 that the U.S. inventory of plutonium-238 - [...]

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Tomorrow night, a European spacecraft is scheduled to blast off from French Guiana on its maiden voyage to the international space station, giving NASA and the world a new way to reach the orbiting laboratory.
For NASA, however, the launch of the Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) also highlights a stark reality: In 2 1/2 [...]

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Podvig describes Russian’s main security concern as maintaining strategic parity with the United States. This parity will be destroyed by U.S. missile-defense systems and space-based weapons, and Podvig suggests that Russia is most likely to respond with “asymmetric” countermeasures, such as extending the service life of multiple-warhead ballistic missiles. Podvig warns such countermeasures will be [...]

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Both the U.S. and China have announced intentions of returning humans to the moon by 2020 at the earliest. And the two countries are already in the early stages of a new space race that appears to have some of the heat and skullduggery of the one between Washington and Moscow during the Cold War, [...]

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Russia proposed a treaty on Tuesday to ban the deployment of weapons in outer space, warning their development could lead to a new arms race and a repeat of the Cold War.
The draft treaty, presented by Russia and China to a U.N.-sponsored forum, would prohibit the deployment of weapons in space and the use or [...]

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In any case, the fact that GLONASS’s performance is worse than GPS is not a recent development. It always has been, and in recent years Russian GNSS experts have been forthright in detailing the shortcomings. (See, for instance, the overview article on GLONASS in the first issue of Inside GNSS.
The poorer performance is the culmination [...]

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The Safir (Emissary) was launched into space Monday, Feb. 4, on top of the improved Shahab-3 which has a 4,000 km range. DEBKAfile’s military sources report that the Iranian launch was Tehran’s rejoinder to Israel’s test of a new long-range missile propulsion engine on Jan. 17. Western experts reported at the time that Israel’s newly-powered [...]

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Russia, whose space programme relies heavily on a base in neighbouring Kazakhstan, is to build its own launch site for manned flights by 2018, First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov was quoted as saying Wednesday.
The new Vostochny base in the Amur region of southeast Russia, bordering China, will be an alternative to the Baikonur base, [...]

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There was, however, a second reason for America’s anger over the Chinese test. America is space’s pre-eminent military power. Or, more exactly, given that America has held back from putting weapons in space, it has used space to preserve and extend the pre-eminent military power it enjoys on earth. By using a missile to blow [...]

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Modern American warfare relies on satellites. They make America powerful but also vulnerable, particularly in light of China’s new celestial assertiveness
If Napoleon’s armies marched on their stomachs, American ones march on bandwidth. Smaller Western allies struggle to keep up. Much of this electronic data is transmitted by satellites, most of them unprotected commercial systems. The [...]

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Scientists estimated the wreckage threatens about 800 satellites in space, 400 of which are U.S.-owned, and said the threat would remain for at least 100 years, the report said.
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