China's Other ASAT

A well-regarded website devoted to “open source military analysis” believes that the picture [below] is of a Chinese anti-satellite laser weapon...In 2006, China fired lasers at U.S. satellites, possibly blinding the spacecraft...and just this week, the head of China’s air force pledged to militarize space “in order to protect peace"...In a post today, IMINT & Analysis stated that these rectangular buildings in the Tian Shan mountain range of Xinjiang province could be hiding the next phase of the Chinese arsenal.

Their aim would be to scratch our eyes out --this is their stick. It's cheap & it would work, although the sat tracking facility would be expensive and complex, as satellites have now reached new levels of stealth.

Please note the need to re-type the terminal portion of the source URL; FR encoding would not permit for repost of (mere?) blog material --these guys REALLY know what they're talking about when it comes to SDI/defense matters, OK?

They have found three other related facilities in China. The original story at source is probably 2,000 words long.

Later at the same site:

“A fully developed and miniaturized FEL could be employed in numerous capacities. Not only could it be employed as a high-powered system at fixed sites, but as lower-power dazzling systems mounted on mobile units and dispersed around the nation. A system able to be emplaced within a satellite laser ranging station would be an interesting weapon as well. Laser ranging systems use pulsed rather than continuous beams to ensure that they are not adversely affecting their targets. A FEL with such a “firing mode” would make a credible dual-use system that could conceivably be deployed at existing ranging sites with little or no knowledge until it was required to switch over to a war footing.

CONCLUSION

In this case, open source imagery and source material seems to corroborate the 2009 report that China has fielded some sort of ASAT system in Xinjiang province. Whether it possesses the power output to destroy a satellite is not known, but the evidence does seem to indicate that the system is in place, that it is a product of AIOFM and CAEP, and that it is likely a FEL. With the operationally tested direct-ascent ASAT providing that capability, however, destruction is not necessarily a must-have capability. May we live in interesting times, indeed.

ADDITIONAL DISCUSSION

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