How have nations militarized space?

November 25th, 2019, Russia launches a satellite called Cosmos 2542. And think-finder writes about space for publications including Scientific American. They're these amateur satellite watchers and they post all the time. So they saw a Russian satellite maneuvering near what they knew was a U.S. spy satellite and sort of getting in the same orbit and tracking it. The U.S. took a visiv action moving it satellite away. And

then they saw the U.S. satellite change orbit, which you can do because they have little thrusters on them. And then the Russian one followed it again and then they tracked for a while. And then the Russian one may or may not have emitted some little sub-satellite. They're clearly- wanting to interfere with our satellite in some way. And that's alarming. Tonight new concerns inside the U.S. Defense

up. Oh my God, there's an Indy killer satellite. What is the plan to stop that? I won't go into all the details of what we can do. But let's just say I'm very comfortable that we can protect and defend ourselves. We have to gain the upper hand. The day we must be on guard in the sky when it comes to protecting our resources. The national resources

that are so precious to us. During the Cold War, American and Russian military satellites performed reconnaissance, navigation, and monitored nuclear missile launches. But his space became increasingly contested, engineers developed weapons to destroy enemy satellites. Hi, Virgo in 1959 was the first U.S. anti-satellite weapon fired from the air and detonated in orbit. In 1975, the first crude space station, the Russian salute, had a cannon that fired

at least 20 high caliber bullets in space. And in 1962, the U.S. detonated a nuclear missile, 254 miles above the Pacific Ocean. Among other impacts, its radiation frined some U.S. and British satellites. The main military advantage of space is providing armies the ultimate lookout over the battlefield. Historians consider the 1991 Gulf War the first, quote, space war. Satellites guided precision bombs and provided American troops in

Iraq, a major advantage in navigation and communications. Satellites have also played a large role in everyday life. The 5,500 in orbit today provide the backbone for modern telecommunications, internet services, and financial transactions. They also keep an eye on weather, oceans, and land. Take the satellite network established by the Pentagon that's become today's GPS. In a 1985 weapons test, an anti-satellite missile launched by an F-15 destroyed

an American research satellite, 345 miles above Earth's surface. Since then, Russia, China, and India have each blown up their own satellites in missile tests. A recent Pentagon report said the fastest growing power in space is China, capable of deploying missiles, lasers, and robots. In 2018, the concern about protecting U.S. space assets led the Trump administration to create the sixth branch of the military. Space Force. Now

the time has come to write the next great chapter. In the history of our armed forces, Space Force operates 77 spacecraft and has 8,600 personnel called Guardians. Delta 9 is the part of the space force that can, quote, deter and when necessary, defeat orbital threats. Space Force says it has a range of responses available to defeat the enemy. We leave those threats without adding to the

space debris problem, though it declines to say how. All aim the agency says toward countering new threats on the horizon. The force, we provide a space of facts to the warfighter. Today, we are the warfighter. We fly in the thinnest fairy systems, citizens around the globe rely on every day. In a world increasingly reliant on space, new threats to strategically important targets, shifting the modern battleground

to the stars. Clayton Sandell, Scripts News.