COLORADO SPRINGS — China is ratcheting up its space capabilities at an impressive clip, with an eye toward challenging the United States' long-held supremacy in the final frontier, U.S. officials say.with the Soviet Union.
Such activities show that China is now treating space as a war-fighting domain, Whiting said. And so, he added, is Russia, which has also conducted ASAT tests recently, including a destructive one. Russia has also been aggressively building out its orbital architecture; since 2018, the nation has more than doubled its total number of active satellites, according to Whiting.
For example, Meink highlighted the need to innovate with the nation's reconnaissance satellites, to make them more numerous, more agile and more resilient. "In reality, space was birthed in great-power competition," he said."In 1957, the Soviet Union won the opening chapters of the space race when theyThe space race came and went without a war in the final frontier, and the same positive outcome is possible today, Whiting stressed.