China's Ambitious Space Programs Raise Red Flags.

• Author: Mayfield, Mandy

China is making progress with several space-related initiatives that are becoming a growing concern for the United States and its allies.

Pentagon officials have grown increasingly worried in recent years about the vulnerability of spacecraft to anti-satellite weapons as Beijing's space programs continue to mature.

China recently designated space as a military domain, and official documents state that the goal of space warfare and operations is to achieve superiority using offensive and defensive means, according to a report released in April by the Secure World Foundation, a non-profit focused on secure and sustainable uses of outer space.

"China has recently reorganized its space and counterspace forces ... and placed them in a new major force structure that also has control over electronic warfare and cyber," said the report, "Global Counterspace Capabilities: An Open Source Assessment." However, "it is uncertain whether China would fully utilize its offensive counterspace capabilities in a future conflict or whether the goal is to use them as a deterrent against U.S. aggression," it added.

Beijing recently conducted the first launch of a new space plane, said Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the foundation.

While the United States knows little about the craft, it is rumored to be similar to the U.S. Air Force's X-37B space plane, which is a smaller, fully robotic version of a space shuttle, Weeden said.

"There is evidence that this new space plane by China went into orbit, made a few [revolutions], deployed a small satellite, and then landed at a military base," Weeden said during a panel hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Besides that we don't really know anything about it."

The United States is also monitoring China's SJ-17 satellite, which recently made a series of orbital maneuvers and rendezvous proximity operations in the geostationary belt, Weeden noted.

"It approached and did what may have been some inspections, or just collected surveillance, of two Chinese satellites," he said.

So far, there has been no indication that the SJ-17 has approached other countries' satellites, Weeden said.

An area of concern for the Defense Department is an adversarial nation potentially using its own satellite to hit and damage a vulnerable U.S. spacecraft.

An option for space-based "active defense" measures would be to leverage "the ability to grab another object in space--an uncooperative object--and take...