The United States will soon be asking other countries to follow suit and cease destructive, debris-spawning anti-satellite tests, Vice President Kamala Harris said.
Harris made that pledge for the US five months ago, and she announced an upcoming and joint international push Friday (Sept. 9) at a National Space Council (NSC) meeting at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“In April, I announced that our nation would not conduct destructive tests with anti-satellite missiles directly ascending,” said Harris, president of the NSC. “And later this month, the United States will submit a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly calling on other countries to make the same commitment.”
Related: The Most Dangerous Space Weapons Ever
The NSC helps shape American space policy. The body is made up of several dozen senior government officials, including the vice president, the NASA administrator, and the defense and state ministers.
Deputy Secretary of State Monica Medina represented her department at Friday’s meeting, the second to be chaired by Harris. Medina promised the state would work hard to get other countries on board with the anti-satellite test pledge at the UN General Assembly, taking place September 13-27 in New York City (opens in new tab).
“In the coming weeks, Assistant Secretary Stewart and her team will hold extensive consultations at the UN,” Medina said, referring to Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Mallory Stewart. “Our aim is for this resolution to be adopted with the widest possible support.”
Direct-ascent anti-satellite (AST) tests, which use rockets to destroy dead or dying satellites, can generate large clouds of space debris that make Earth orbit a more dangerous place for other spacecraft to inhabit. Russia spawned such a cloud with a widely condemned ASAT test in November 2021; that new debris field has forced the International Space Station to perform evasive maneuvers several times.
The ASAT discussion was part of a larger conversation at the NSC meeting on responsible space behavior. Harris and other meeting participants, including Medina, stressed the importance of establishing such standards of behavior in an increasingly crowded and competitive space environment — and that the United States must set an example for other countries to follow.
That was also a theme at the first NSC meeting that Harris chaired, which took place in Washington D.C. last December. Harris highlighted two other big topics at last year’s meeting: strengthening US technological competitiveness by investing in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education and the use of satellites to monitor and help mitigate climate change.
NSC members provided progress updates in these areas at Friday’s meeting. For example, NASA administrator Bill Nelson spoke about the agency’s Earth System Observatory program, which will use a new set of satellites to study our planet in different ways.
At Friday’s meeting, Harris also announced a plan to open three STEM training pilot programs, one each in Florida, the Gulf Coast and Southern California. At each location, commercial aerospace companies, including Blue Origin, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, will partner with community colleges, technical schools and unions to train the next generation of aerospace workers, from engineers to welders, machinists and electricians. .
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).
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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer at Space.com (opens in a new tab) and joined the team in 2010. He mainly deals with exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to be on the beat of space art. His book on the search for extraterrestrial life, “Out There”, was published on November 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in scientific writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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How many spy satellites are there?
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The launch took place on February 20, 2008 at approximately 10:26 PM. EST from the USS Lake Erie, using a highly modified Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) to shoot down the satellite. A few minutes after launch, the SM-3 intercepted its target and successfully completed its mission.
Did Putin shoot down his own satellite? By mid-afternoon on the day of the launch, US officials had confirmed that Russia had conducted a test by deliberately firing a missile at a defunct Soviet intelligence satellite called Cosmos 1408, part of the Tselina-D system.
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