Last week, following information from the US Congress that mentioned the development of a new Russian weapon to destroy satellites, some rumors about a possible threat to national security came to light.
On the one hand, such a weapon would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits placing nuclear weapons or any other type of weapons of mass destruction in orbit around the Earth. Russia is a party to these treaties, although this is not the first time it has failed to fulfill its nuclear arms control obligations.
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Like Russia, the US has also conducted high-altitude nuclear tests. In 1962, in the midst of the space race, the Starfish experiment placed a thermonuclear warhead on a missile and detonated it 400 kilometers above the Earth's surface, creating an electromagnetic pulse that spread and affected satellites, aircraft and electronic equipment in orbit. on land. The following year, the United States and the former Soviet Union signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, marking the end of testing nuclear weapons in space for a little longer.
However, just a few years before Starfish, anti-satellite weapons, or ASAD, were already a reality. After the launch of the first artificial satellite, which occurred in 1957, missiles aimed at destroying satellites were developed.
The Bolt Orion missile is the prototype of a North American air-launched ballistic missile that was used in early ASAD testing. The initial configuration used a single-stage solid-fuel rocket, which was later converted to a two-stage vehicle. The first test flight of the Bolt Orion was carried out on May 26, 1958 from a Boeing B-47 carrier aircraft, after which 12 flights were completed, and then four more in a modified version that had a range of 1,600 kilometers.
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This would be the last of the launches in October 1959, intercepting the Explorer 6 satellite at an altitude of 250 kilometers. This is the first time in history that anti-satellite missiles have been shown to be viable. In the following decades, countries such as the US, Russia, China and India continued to build and test Assad. Some of the recent satellite destructions include the destruction of an old weather satellite achieved by China in 2007 and the failed spy satellite by the US in 2008.
More recently, Russia developed a Matryoshka satellite, which was used to launch a small satellite. The latter opens to release a projectile capable of neutralizing nearby satellites. In 2019, one of these Russian satellites was found to be near a US satellite.
Half a century after Bolt Orion, the development of new satellites now allegedly developed by Russia is dangerous and will have an important impact on the geostrategic landscape, taking into account the role of satellites in many aspects. Our daily life. , and a moving space economy of more than $500,000 million.
Current war tensions, such as the war in Ukraine, are favorable conditions for the development of programs that allow control over satellite information and communications. Advances in the use of space and dependence on related advances require more serious responsibilities on the part of governments to think about the future of humanity.
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Santiago Vargas
Ph.D. D. in Astrophysics
Astronomical Laboratory of National University
