The jaw-dropping Chinese space weapons with ‘mind-boggling’ capabilities – from ‘Death Star’ to secret space plane
CHINA has injected billions into advancing its homegrown space industry, and now has the second-largest satellite fleet in the world - behind only the US.
But the technology the country is pushing out has spooked defence chiefs in the US, a long-time space-faring nation.
Satellite-destroying 'Death Star'
Chinese scientists say they have built a new type of satellite-destroying weapon that converges multiple high-powered microwave beams to take out a single target.
According to a report from South China Morning Post, a pro-China paper, the weapon is a similar concept to the super laser from the Death Star featured in Star Wars.
The space laser has allegedly completed experimental trials on its potential military use.
China has reportedly been developing high-powered microwave (HPM) weapons with the potential to disrupt radar systems, computers, communication infrastructures, and even missiles and satellites.
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But each microwave beam needs to be positioned with millimetre-level accuracy to work.
Time synchronisation must also be within 170 picoseconds, or trillionths of a second, which is more precise than the atomic clocks on GPS satellites.
Chinese scientists said the latest technology could suppress signals of American GPS and other satellites, "achieving multiple goals such as teaching and training, new technology verification, and military exercises."
Web of satellites
In September, a Space Force intelligence report warned that China's military is rapidly building up space capabilities.
It said that over 970 recently deployed satellites could support attacks on US aircraft carriers, expeditionary forces and air wings during a conflict.
China last year sent the classified Yaogan-41 optical satellite into orbit, an 18.5metre-long hunk of tech believed to have a resolution down to around 2.5metres, according to Forbes.
This suggests it is capable of seeing car-sized objects.
That is the equivalent to seeing a strand of hair from 800meters away, a study from the Chinese Academy of Science reported.
While state media reported that the satellite will be used in land surveys, crop yield estimations, and weather forecasting, onlookers in the US believe it to be designed for military purposes.
US warnings
The chief of the US Space Force warned last week that China is putting military capabilities into space at a “mind-boggling” pace.
“The number of different categories of space weapons that [China has] created and... the speed with which they’re doing it is very threatening,” said General Chance Saltzman, head of space operations.
“One of the reasons you have a space force in the US now is in recognition of the last 20 years, [Russia and China] have developed and demonstrated the ability to conduct war fighting in space,” he said.
Beijing has consistently dismissed US claims that it's tech poses a danger to other countries.
China's foreign ministry accused Washington this year of “repeatedly hyping up China” as a threat as “an excuse for the US to expand its forces in outer space and maintain military hegemony.”
The US and China have even butted heads over the race to the moon, a dispute in which Nasa boss Bill Nelson believes Beijing could claim the rocky satellite as its own territory.
As part of large-scale military reforms that started in 2015, President Xi Jinping combined space, information, and cyberwarfare operations under the Strategic Support Force, a new arm of the People’s Liberation Army.
Under Xi, China spent roughly $14billion (11.2billion) on its ambitious space programme in 2023, according to Statista.
Secretive spaceplane
China has maintained strict secrecy around its spaceplane, dubbed CSSHQ, so it's unclear whether it can be used as a weapon or not.
The only images available of the spaceplane are those that have been leaked by insiders.
Though experts believe it is China's attempt to develop a rival to the US' X-37B spaceplane.
In September, the top-secret spaceplane returned to Earth after more than eight months in orbit.
The reusable spacecraft landed at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre, located in a remote corner of northwest China, according to state media outlet Xinhua.
The spaceplane was launched atop a Long March 2F rocket in December 2023.
It was the spacecrafts third mission, spending 268 days in orbit.
It's first launch was in September 2020, and lasted just two days.
Little is known about the spaceplane, its capabilities, or the aims of its mission.
Xinhua stated that the craft will "pave the way for more convenient and affordable round-trip methods for the peaceful use of space in the future."
In May, the spaceplane ejected an unknown object into orbit, according to ground-level spacecraft trackers, which one expert speculated could be a subsatellite.
"This object could be a subsatellite deployment," astronomer Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, wrote on X.
"Or, it could be a piece of hardware ejected prior to end of mission and deorbit (the space plane's first flight did something similar)."
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It may have also been an object spat out to test capture maneuvers with the spacecraft, like it did on its second in-orbit test flight.
Space Force, a faction of the US military, have catalogued the object as 59884.
Terrifying space weapons of the future
Here are three of the scariest...
Rods from God
- A strange but utterly terrifying weapon has been dubbed “rods from the God” and is based on the concept of creating man-made meteorites that can be guided towards the enemy.
- Instead of using rocks, rods the size of telephone poles are deployed.
- These would be made out of tungsten — a rare metal that can stand the intense heat generated by entering Earth’s atmosphere.
- One satellite fires the rods towards the Earth’s atmosphere while the other steers them to a target on the ground.
- Reaching speeds of 7000mph they hit the ground with the force of a small nuclear weapon — but crucially creating no radiation fall out.
- As bizarre as it sounds, a US Congressional report recently revealed the military has been pushing ahead with the kinetic space weapons.
Molten metal cannons
- This intriguing idea is being developed by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
- It is called the Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition or MAHEM.
- This game changing rail-gun can fire a jet of molten metal, hurled through space at several hundred miles per second by the most powerful electromagnets ever built.
- The molten metal can then morph into an aerodynamic slug during flight and pierce through another spacecraft or satellite and a munition explodes inside.
Space force ships
- Already the United States is powering head with its spacecraft, although China is busy developing one of their own.
- The top-secret American XS-1 is under development by DARPA.
- It can travel ten times the speed of sound and launch missiles.
- Meanwhile an unmanned craft is currently being developed in the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Centre in Mianyang, Sichuan province, which is also known as Base 29.