US officials: China's space advances could pose existential threat to US

American officials say China is gaining the upper hand in space and that could pose an existential threat to US national security.

The officials made the remarks while speaking at the Space Force Association’s ‘Lasso the Moon’ conference in Houston on Monday, The Hill reported.

“Whoever leads in space sets the rules. And I for one don't want the Chinese Communist Party setting our rules,” said Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), who attended the conference virtually due to illness.

The United States, China and Russia have been striving for power in space for years. China and Russia have joined forces for a number of space missions and initiatives, including plans for a research base on the moon.

China is also planning to send an expedition to the moon by 2024. The US planning a moon mission by 2025.

“Bottom line, we cannot give up our American presence in LEO [low-Earth orbit]. I am not interested in ceding any more turf to other states, or worse, to adversarial nations like China,” said Babin. “China is a problem, and the more they prioritize space, the more of a problem they will become.”

China also reportedly plans to complete its space station by the end of this year, and is also expected to launch some 40 space flights this year alone.

China blasted America’s irresponsibility after a recent near-miss between China’s space station and two of Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellites.

Babin said the US still dominates the space landscape, but “if we fall victim to partisanship gains, our leadership will erode over time.”

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Lt. Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s deputy chief of operations, nuclear and cyber, drew a parallel with the current information war around Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. 

“If you do not have control of space and cyber, forget about Taiwan. If you do not own the information space, forget about Ukraine,” Saltzman said during his speech at Monday’s event.

“If we are reactive in space for cyber domains, we are going to fail. We just don’t have the luxury of time to recover. And so we have to be ahead of this power curve,” Saltzman added.

Saltzman praised the way the US has waged the information war against Russia, and cited it as an example of how non-military arenas can shape geopolitical power.

‘Pentagon seeks to turn space into a battlefield’

In a recent interview with Press TV, American political analyst Bill Dores said, “Of the 3,372 satellites now orbiting Earth, 1,897 belong to the United States. (China is second, with 412.) Of those 160 are officially military. But most of the commercial and weather satellites also carry spy equipment.”

“The United States has also destroyed satellites in space. In February 2008, the US Navy carried out Operation Burnt Frost, destroying a malfunctioning US military satellite that threatened to unleash toxic debris onto our atmosphere,” he noted.  

“But the Pentagon seeks to go beyond spying. It aims to turn space into a battlefield. In 1984, they created the US Space Defense Command with a view to weaponizing outer space,” he said.  

“In 2019, the Trump regime created the US Space Force. The Pentagon also set up the Space Development Agency that same year,” he said.

“Trump was rightly ridiculed for the Space Force. Yet the Biden White House has continued it, even as it battles Congress to fund badly needed infrastructure and social programs,” he said.

“The US militarization of space is not only a massive theft of resources from human needs in the United States. It forces other countries to divert their own resources in self-defense. And as the Russian test showed, if the US continues to pursue this dangerous course, it will be answered,” the analyst said.

“Space exploration should be for the good of humanity and life on earth, not a means to destroy it. It should be an area of cooperation, not armed confrontation. The United States should shut down the Space Force and deactivate its military satellites before it’s too late,” he concluded.

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