![]() But it depends more than any other country on its military satellites for communication and surveillance. The country relies heavily on its satellites to transmit signals for GPS, credit-card transactions, hospital systems, television stations, weather reports the list goes on and on. more than anyone else, space war could be ruinous. And then which satellites, and which services civilization depends on, would be destroyed?įor the U.S. might have retaliated, perhaps by destroying a Russian spacecraft, and we might have had a space war. Cosmos 2542 could have been equipped to interfere with or damage USA 245 or to blow it to pieces. Nor is it war from the highest of all military high grounds: “Satellites don't ‘drop’ bombs,” Grego says, “and aren't faster, better or less expensive than other ways of bombing.” Space war is war on satellites. Space war is not warfighters shooting one another in space. Laura Grego, an astrophysicist who studies space technology, saw the tweets she catalogues satellites, so she has been reading amateur watchers’ communications, she says, “since before Twitter was invented.” One country's satellite stalking another's is exactly what people like Grego, who worry about space war, worry about. “This is all circumstantial evidence,” the watcher wrote, but “a hell of a lot of circumstances make it look like a known Russian inspection satellite is currently inspecting a known U.S. On January 30, 2020, an amateur satellite watcher tweeted, “Something to potentially watch.” Cosmos 2542, a Russian inspection satellite, was “loitering around” USA 245, an American spy satellite, and, he wrote, “as I'm typing this, that offset distance shifts between 150 and 300 kilometers.” USA 245 then adjusted its orbit to get away from Cosmos 2542, which in turn tweaked its own orbit to get closer again.
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