More than 490 of the CCP’s 970 satellites are intelligence-capable satellites, according to a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College.
The United States’ Space Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) director, Kelly Hammett, has revealed that in January 2023, America quietly launched a payload designed to detect Chinese satellite tracking in space.
According to Air & Space Forces Magazine, Hammet,
addressing a media roundtable at the Air & Space Forces Association (AFA) Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado, on March 5, said the technology alerts its operators when detected and will thus be deployed on all Space Force satellites.
Hammett, explaining that the current prototype can tell if it is being “observed, tracked [or] targeted,” said that since the space vehicles were launched, his division received “very interesting data.”
The payload was fired into space by aerospace, defense, and security company Northrop Gruman, which
confirmed the launch in a Jan. 16, 2023, report: “Northrop Grumman Corporation’s (NYSE: NOC) Long Duration Propulsive ESPA (LDPE)-3A spacecraft launched successfully in support of the USSF-67 mission.”
The webpage said that the spacecraft allowed for quick transit into space and noted that the launch was the third in the corporation’s LDPE project.
Northrop Grumman’s news release stated that it used a “common baseline,” giving its clients—in this case, the U.S. Space Force—greater control over the mission. It also noted that the launch carried enough equipment for five space missions and did not specify the equipment’s purpose.
The RCO, according to Hammett, plans to proliferate the prototype’s capabilities across the Space Force and has already taken steps in that direction.
In January 2025, it
commissioned FedTech, a federal program bridging the gap between government technology labs and the private sector, and various space startups with the task of collaborating to “enhance space situational awareness, defensive capabilities, and operational readiness” in a program it calls the “Space RCO Prime Fusion Accelerator.”
As a nod to the communist state’s 970-strong satellite inventory—per a July 2024 analysis on China’s space threats by Andrew Erickson, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College—Hammett suspects that the data relayed to his team since the prototype launch likely came from a Chinese SISO, which refers to a sensor and radar network used for space object surveillance and identification.
According to
Erickson, more than 490 of these satellites are ISR-capable (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and equipped with optical, multispectral, radar, and radio frequency sensors.
China’s Desire to Dominate Space
In 2021, China was noted to have launched an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). What set it aside from the Russian, U.S., or any other variant was that the projectile’s function changed during flight from an ICBM to a glide vehicle.
This
anomaly, according to Air Force Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt, who was also deputy head of the cyber and nuclear space operations, was “even more scary,” she told the space defense forum on April 5, 2022, as it hinted at the missile’s ability to evade certain detection capabilities.
A 2022
whitepaper named “China’s Space Program: A 2021 Perspective,” set a five-year goal to “integrate space science, technology, and applications while pursuing the new development philosophy, building a new development model, and meeting the requirements for high-quality development.”
The communique, published by the State Council Information Office, noted that the Chinese regime said that this endeavor would “start a new journey toward space power.”
The paper said that China planned to launch at least 40 satellites in 2022.
A November 2022
report by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs found that China had been using its satellites “for military and civilian remote sensing and mapping, terrestrial and maritime surveillance, and intelligence collection.”
“China’s ISR satellites are capable of providing electro-optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery as well as electronic and signals intelligence data,” the report continued.
On April 5, 2023, Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, who headed up the space operations for the Space Force, said that China and Russia were capable of attacking satellites.
Speaking at a Space Defense conference, he
said that the communist regime possessed “counter-space capabilities, including terrestrial lasers to disrupt and degrade satellite sensors, electronic warfare jammers, targeting GPS and satellite communications, as well as anti-satellite missiles.”
On July 17, 2024, Space Force Gen. Stephen Whiting
told an Aspen Institute think tank, “In the last six years, they’ve tripled the number of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance satellites they have on orbit.”
He further noted these satellites posed a threat to the United States and allied Forces in the Indo-Pacific.
U.S. Indo-Pacific Space Forces Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir
spoke at the same 2025 AFA Symposium in Colorado on March 4, when he warned of the complexities China’s space capabilities added to the Indo-Pacific status quo.
“We have begun to see the space piece integrated into some of that [military training drills], not as much early on, but more recently.”
In the context of his observations, he cited a need for the U.S. Space Force to protect its soldiers from a Chinese “space-enabled attack.”
