A Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) launched from the United States Navy ship USS Lake Erie at an inactive National Reconnaissance Office satellite on February 20, 2008 as an anti-defence weapon pure
US Department of Defense
Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Monday that the US government was committed to ending the practice of anti-satellite missile tests, and urged other countries to follow government guidance.
An anti-satellite weapon test, or ASAT, is a military demonstration in which an orbiting spacecraft is destroyed using a missile system. Countries that perform ASAT checks have previously done so by targeting their assets in space.
Plans for the move have been established late last year, after the Russian army destroy a defunct satellite with ASAT on November 15, Russia’s test generated thousands of pieces of debris in low Earth orbit, and took astronauts aboard the International Space Station into shelter as it passed through the shrapnel field.
During Harris’s first meeting in December as chair of the National Space Council, the vice president directed the team to work with other agencies and make recommendations to establish safety standards. New national security in space.
The US ASAT commitment, which coincides with Harris’s tour of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Tuesday, marks the first step of that effort. The White House insisted that “the United States was the first country to make such a declaration” to end such testing.
So far, four countries – the US, Russia, China and India – have destroyed their own satellites during ASAT tests. The last time the US destroyed a satellite was in 2008, when the US Navy launched a modified SM-3 missile to intercept the malfunctioning National Reconnaissance Office satellite USA-193.
Additionally, the White House has continued to push for the Artemis Agreement, an international agreement on space cooperation drafted by NASA and the State Department during the Trump administration. So far, 18 countries have signed the agreement, with nine participating since President Joe Biden took office.
