The Pentagon is mulling ways to curb its reliance on its eyes and ears in space, concerned about a perceived threat to its satellites from China, a top Air Force official said Thursday. Gary Payton, deputy under secretary for space programs, voiced concern at Beijing's display last month of technology aimed at destroying missiles in mid-air, an area in which Washington has invested hundreds of billions of dollars to build a layered antimissile bulwark.
"They're still openly testing them in a very dynamic environment above the atmosphere," he said of a reportedly successful Chinese missile-defence test. He equated this with Beijing's demonstration of antisatellite technology that pulverised one of its own weather satellites in January 2007.
"It wasn't that much different," Payton told a forum on the space budget organised by the Space Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes the use of space. "It's a threat that we have to learn how to overcome." Asked whether China had been trying to jam US satellites or to use lasers to disrupt them, as US officials have alleged in the past, Payton said: "I can't talk about that."
The United States demonstrated an anti-satellite capability of its own, using a specially modified Raytheon Co Standard Missile-3 to destroy a wayward US spy satellite in February 2008. "Obviously, I can't go into gory details about what the intelligence community tells me the bad guys are doing," he told reporters.