China’s military capability in space comes from (1) Motorola’s Iridium launches, (2) Hughes’ and Loral’s ILLEGAL transfer of space technology to China to accomplish (1), and Bill Clinton’s (and Al Gore’s) open flouting of the law and acceptance of corporate bribes from China and Hughes/Loral to “get ‘r done” in transferring export licenses to Commerce and his good-buddy Ron Brown.

georgej on January 18, 2007 at 3:58 PM

Thank you georgej!! That is the most accurate account I have seen of the Clinton legacy EVER. That is the true Clinton legacy: Selling out our national security to the Chinese after Reagan tried to convince Congress that Star Wars would be the future.

Here we are with another Clinton co-presidency looming if this country does not wake up to their treasonous ways!! Believe me. They will find a way to remove the Obama obstacle from their path!

The Chinese have successfully tested a new anti-satellite weapon, destroying one of their aging weather satellites. You may recall from this post that the U.S. has been aware of the threat for months, but has kept it quiet as efforts…

Potestas Democraticorum delenda est!

georgej on January 18, 2007 at 3:58 PM

BRAVO!!!!!!!!!

I’d be surprised if any of the debris actually made it to the ground.
dalewalt on January 18, 2007 at 5:25 PM

You’re right, but its not the ground we’re concerned with, it’s the billions of dollars in communications and ‘other’ sat’s up there that a 1 inch piece of metal could/WOULD obliterate if they collided. Not to mention our shuttles.

Can we start to believe in Ronald Reagan NOW? Maybe even retroactively decide to act on a few issues?

I must admit that when I first read your post I checked my glass to make sure it wasnt kool aid! No harm.

Yes, I do have some connection as I have worked with satellite systems (ours and others) in the past. I am not saying I know for sure we weren’t surprised. I am basing my statements on previous experience and current capability knowledge. No, we aren’t perfect at catching everything, but we do get more than the press and others give us credit for.

I want to also note I am not trying to make light of this issue. If they do get an ASAT capability as described, it will be a VERY BAD thing.

Entelechy on January 18, 2007 at 5:20 PM

Next thing you will tell me it is not nuculear.

And the race to militarize space is on!

A.P., the race has been “on” for a while now. The Chinese didn’t just roll out of bed this morning and shoot down a satellite. They’ve been working on space warfare for a while. So have the Russians. And us.

Bottom line: In the 21st Century, control of space will be to warfare what air superiority became in the 20th Century. If you have it, life on the battlefield is much, much easier. If you don’t have it, life on the battlefield is going to be much, much more problematic.

1. The Chinese have made no secret that they consider the United States to be their most likely wartime opponent in the future (except perhaps for Taiwan, but then Chinese aggression against Taiwan is likely what would trigger a Sino-American war). The Chinese are well aware of our heavy reliance on satellites for communications, navigation, reconnaissance and weapons targeting; thus it should come as no surprise to anybody that they would undertake measures to negate our space-based capabilities. This is not, to pardon the expression, “rocket science.” Nobody should be surprised by this development.

2. Why is it that whenever the topic of American missile defense comes up, the “popular wisdom” is that it’ll never work, the technical challenges are too difficult, the testing doesn’t reflect reality, the enemy can easily defeat the system, blah blah blah … while when the Chinese undertake something almost as technologically audacious – kinetic hit-to-kill anti-satellite weapons or anti-satellite lasers – “popular wisdom” assumes that they’re simply able to accomplish this and that there’s nothing we can do?

With what seems like a large part of the military infrastructure relying on GPS nowadays (smart bombs, navigation, etc), does the military have fallback solutions for getting things where they need to go, so to speak? Or if the GPS system is seriously damaged, does that mean our troops will be resorting to knives and sticks?

Anyone with more knowledge than I on this subject know the answer?

Hack Ptui on January 18, 2007 at 3:56 PM

The answer to this question is that we do train for the possibility that we won’t have all of our technological means available. For example, I’m currently at Gowen Field, Idaho, going through Cav Scout training. We plan on the worst-case scenarios:

- We train with GPS land navigation systems, but receive even more training with the old-fashioned map, compass and protractor.

- We train with GPS and laser-rangefinder means of calling for and directing indirect fire, but train even more with binoculars, map, protractor and compass.

- We train with radios to direct and control movement, but train even more with arm and hand signals.

There’s always the hope that our people at places like DARPA and the U.S. Space Command are coming up will all kinds of ways to defeat a Chinese “Pearl Harbor” in space; but just in case they’re able to pull off such a strike, we still train for the possibility that we won’t have our high-tech toys available to play with, at least for a while.

Right, sandy?

which followed by several months the alleged illumination of a U. S. military spacecraft by a Chinese ground based laser.

Wait a minute. We have military spacecraft?

They’ve been waging war against our economy for years. What do you think the world would do if China knocked out one of our telecom satellites? What if these fragments start pelting satellites and knocking them out?

Mind you, I don’t think it’s likely anything would happen, but it always scares me because the international community is so inept at dealing with impending threats. I’d like to think we are better at dealing with threats, but with the new Congress… What is the over/under on how much damage China could hypothetically do before they faced any repercussions? Whatever it is, I’ll take the over.

What do the environmentalists have to say about all that debris?

Entelechy on January 18, 2007 at 5:20 PM

I’d be surprised if any of the debris actually made it to the ground.

What is the NYT’s take on this?

What do the environmentalists have to say about all that debris?

On the day of the test, a U.S. defense official said the United States was unable to communicate with an experimental spy satellite launched last year by the Pentagon’s National Reconnaissance Office. But there was no immediate indication that this was a result of the Chinese test.

For those that think that ballistic missiles (with either conventional or nuclear warheads) on hair-trigger alert might be a defense against this, I’ll point out that a successful kinetic-kill ASAT program is exceptionally close to a successful ABM program. While detection time is reduced significantly for a ballistic missile, the speeds and mathematics involved are for all practical purposes identical. Furhter, depending on the size of that weather satellite, a ballistic missile’s re-entry vehicle isn’t that much smaller.

Boy, am I glad that we can’t put weapons into space because some jack<rest of expletive deleted> decided that nobody other than the American Military Industrial Complex™ would ever dream of militarizing space </sarcasm>.

Chinese Test Anti-Satellite Weapon U. S. intelligence agencies believe China performed a successful anti-satellite (asat) weapons test at more than 500 mi. altitude Jan. 11 destroying an aging Chinese weather satellite target with a kinetic kill vehicl…

Last week, China reportedly conducted a successful test of a “space weapon” capable of taking out satellites in the earth’s orbit. And for obvious reasons, this move isn’t exactly being applauded by the international community. The United States, A…

Chinese Test Anti-Satellite Weapon U. S. intelligence agencies believe China performed a successful anti-satellite (asat) weapons test at more than 500 mi. altitude Jan. 11 destroying an aging Chinese weather satellite target with a kinetic kill vehicl…

[I]f this anti-sat weapon was really “kinetic” — i.e., hit-to-kill, non-explosive — instead of a plain ol’ exploding weapon, that’s extremely bad news. That means the booster rocket has to be very accurate “in order to deliver the kill vehicle to the desired initial trajectory…. Then the kill vehicle needs to tweak its trajectory into a precise collision course using on-board propulsion and either on-board target tracking or… command guidance from the ground.” That’s no mean task.

Bill Clinton is responsible for this.

No, this isn’t “Clinton hater” rhetoric, but fact. Really.

The story is long and sordid and the ‘younguns’ among you may not remember, ’cause it happened in the New Camelot years of the 90’s.

In the early 90’s, Motorola designed the Iridium satellite-based cell phone system. Using a constellation of low earth orbit satellites, Iridium would allow a compact handset to make a phone call anywhere on the planet to any other phone on the planet, without complicated dish alignment. It would be like making a cell phone call, but without having to have towers nearby.

In order to get the necessary 66 birds plus spares in orbit in a reasonable time, Motorola needed launch capabilities that exceeded that of NASA.

The Clinton administration (after a suitable “campaign contribution” from Motorola), allowed Motorola to purchase rides to orbit from the Chinese. Okay, it wasn’t a simple quid (”bribe”) pro quo (”foreign export license”), but involved an entire business venture into China. From pagers, to encrypted military two-way radios, to manufacturing plants in China. In all, Motorola sunk more than 2 billion dollars into China (maybe more, but I’ve since sold my Motorola stock so I haven’t kept up).

The problem was that China’s intercontinental ballistic missiles (the launch vehicle for Motorola’s satellites) were completely unreliable and more often than not failed to reach orbit.

What was the exact Clinton administration role in this?

1. Encrypted radios required an export license because of the technology. Encrypted radios from Motorola were the deal maker if Moto was going to get into China or to to get the birds launched at all.

2. Export licenses required DOD and State Department approval. Which both departments denied. In fact SecState Warren Christopher was adamant in refusing any militarily useful exports to China, not only for radios but for computers, jet engine designs and manufacturing machinery, missile guidance technology, or anything else that would improve China’s military.

3. China’s missiles were crap. They were a “paper tiger” that simply didn’t threaten the United States because an ICBM that blows up on the pad or during launch is NOT a credible threat to the United States. It is estimated that in 1994, China had ONLY 2 reliable ICBMs capable of launching, but whose accuracy was questionable. Nor was China’s missiles useful vehicles to launch communication satellites, even into low earth orbit.

4. To improve the reliability of the missiles and get Moto’s birds and other commercial payloads into orbit, the Chinese hired Hughes Space and Communications Company and Loral Space & Communications Ltd. However, improving China’s satellite (and ICBM) launch capability required export licenses, as these are clearly covered technologies that cannot be exported to “unfriendly” countries by greedy western businesses. Warren Christopher and DOD demurred and refused to issue them.

5. In order the “expedite” the export licenses, the CEO’s of Hughes and Loral repeatedly “slept in the Lincoln Bedroom” (i.e., gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the DNC, played golf with Clinton, attended soirees with Bill and Hillary), and China gave hundreds of thousands to the Clinton’s personal bag man, AL GORE, to personally carry back to Washington from a California “fund raiser” involving “Chinese Budhist nuns” in a campaign money laundering scheme. (Remember when Gore said that there was no “controlling authority” over his behavior in this?)

6. Clinton closed the deal with China by moving export licensing from DOD and State to Commerce and Ron Brown. Who promptly approved them.

7. Even with the export licenses, Hughes and Loral went FAR BEYOND what was approved and gave China the technology to not only launch satellites, but ACCURATELY TARGET cities in the United States.

BTW, this is all amply documented (unlike the utter nonsense and lies from Rep Hinchey) in the 1999 bi-Partisan Cox Report that is available from http://www.house.gov and in the book Betrayal : How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security by Bill Gertz (1999). Both of these document in explicit detail how Clinton undercut national security and illegally transferred military technology to China — and how he was handsomely repaid for doing so.

China’s military capability in space comes from (1) Motorola’s Iridium launches, (2) Hughes’ and Loral’s ILLEGAL transfer of space technology to China to accomplish (1), and Bill Clinton’s (and Al Gore’s) open flouting of the law and acceptance of corporate bribes from China and Hughes/Loral to “get ‘r done” in transferring export licenses to Commerce and his good-buddy Ron Brown.

And, if Hillary does get the Democratic nomination for President, it will prove, once again, that the DEMOCRATIC PARTY is the party of treason, because China’s missile capabilities are where it is at today, BECAUSE OF BILL AND HILLARY’s “Co-Presidency.” And you though I was simply a hyper-partisan Republican, didn’tya?

Potestas Democraticorum delenda est!