Exploration advocates want to put the brakes on a developing orbital arms race.
One month later, 163 countries in the United Nations General Assemblyto create a working group to stave off a space arms race. As that working group now gathers in Geneva, its members face an unsettling problem: the growing weaponization of space poses a threat to human spaceflight in more than one way.The most common satellite-smashers in the world's imagination are likely physical kinetic weapons — missiles, for instance, that cause damage by crashing into their targets at high speed.
out of a polar orbit. In 2019, India tested an anti-satellite missile system of its own. Russia's 2021 test only adds to this growing litany.. Sometimes, it can fall back into Earth's atmosphere and harmlessly burn up. Other times, it can circulate for years. Shards of the 2007 Chinese incident still threaten satellites today.
"I don't think people will actually target humans in space, but the debris aspect is quite dangerous," Makena Young, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies , a think tank in Washington D.C., told Space.com.into four kinds, and physical kinetic weapons are just one of them. A second category,"non-physical kinetic weapons," includes high-altitude nuclear detonations or anti-satellite laser weapons. The former are banned by the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty . Lasers, on the other hand, have no such restriction. The