While much attention has been paid to China’s development of traditional ground-based antisatellite weapons, a more nefarious threat to America’s space assets continues to receive far less attention.

In a new article, “Stalkers in Space: Defeating the Threat,” in Strategic Studies Quarterly, Brian Chow, formerly senior physical scientist at the RAND Corporation, discusses China’s “space stalkers,” which he calls a “game-changing threat” to America’s satellites.

“Since 2008, China has been developing a new co-orbital antisatellite weapon (ASAT),” Chow writes. “These ‘space stalkers’ could be placed on orbit in peacetime and maneuvered to tailgate US satellites during a crisis. At a moment’s notice, they could simultaneously attack multiple critical satellites from such close proximity that the United States would not have time to prevent damage.” These co-orbital ASATs are often indistinguishable from benign satellites, yet they are able to knock out satellites in close proximity through various weapons, such as kinetic-energy weapons, explosive charges, fragmentation devices and robotic arms.

China has been testing its capabilities to use space stalkers, by conducting a number of rendezvous-proximity operations in which these satellites fly within striking distance of potential targets. For instance, Chow points to a September 2008 incident, in which a Chinese miniature imaging satellite came within forty-five kilometers of the International Space Station without providing prior notification. Another example came in 2010, when China launched the SJ-12 satellite. Once in orbit, the satellite maneuvered to bump into China’s SJ-6F satellite. Most illuminating, in July 2013 China launched a rocket carrying the CX-3, SY-7 and SJ-15 satellites into space. One of these satellites was equipped with a robotic arm, and once all were in orbit, that satellite grabbed one of the others with its arm.

Space stalkers are only one part of China’s much larger counterspace doctrine. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) writings have continuously stressed the importance of destroying America’s space assets. As the Pentagon recounts in its annual reports on China’s military, “PLA writings emphasize the necessity of ‘destroying, damaging, and interfering with the enemy’s reconnaissance . . . and communications satellites, suggesting that such systems, as well as navigation and early warning satellites, could be among the targets of attacks designed to ‘blind and deafen the enemy.” The reason is not hard to discern; as STRATCOM commander General John Hyten has warned, if enough satellites are destroyed, the U.S. military would be reduced to fighting primitive “industrial age warfare.”

To achieve this, the Chinese military has been acquiring a toxic mix of traditional and new capabilities. “This mix,” Chow writes “is coherently and asymmetrically designed to counter a far more technologically advanced US space capability.”

Among the more traditional threats are ground-based ASAT weapons like the one China used to destroy its own weather satellite in 2007. The space debris that resulted from this test led to widespread international condemnation, including among nominally friendly nations like Russia. Since then, China has continued to test these ASAT weapons in “nondestructive” ways that create minimal amounts of debris. Indeed, Bill Gertz reported that China conducted another test of a new Dong Neng-3 direct-ascent antisatellite missile last month, although that test was unsuccessful. However, if these weapons were actually used to attack satellites, they would generate huge amount of debris, which the world abhors.

As Chow notes, space stalkers, especially those equipped with robotic arms, would produce far less space debris than ascent missiles, making them more attractive to Beijing. Most worrisome, space stalkers can simultaneously destroy many more U.S. satellites than the traditional ground-based ASAT weapons at the opening of a space war, which could result in a space Pearl Harbor. As Chow has explained elsewhere, traditional ground-based ascent missiles typically take about four hours to reach geosynchronous orbits, where many of the most important U.S. satellites are located. This is not the case with space stalkers. Because there is no international or U.S. understanding, any country can preset as many space stalkers as one wants, in close range to another country’s satellites. Consequently, space stalkers could conduct simultaneous attacks on America’s critical geosynchronous satellites, and the warning time would be too short for Washington to defend them.

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