China responded on Tuesday by warning against an “arms race” in space.
“We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space,” AFP quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.
Details of how the weapon operates have not been disclosed by US officials.
A US Space Force spokesperson said: “Space control encapsulates the mission areas required to contest and control the space domain – employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities through disruption, degradation and even destruction, if necessary.
“These capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes at the direction of combatant commands.”
An expert on military uses of outer space noted that “precious little” was publicly known about the technology, and told the BBC there could be a “whole range of different weapons systems”.
Speaking to Radio 4’s Today programme, Dr Bleddyn Bowen, from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said he was “totally guessing” but that the US could have been referring to “some kind electronic warfare or radio jamming platform”.
That would be the sort of weapon that already exists on Earth and could disrupt radio communications, Bowen said.
An alternative would be “a kinetic kill vehicle of some sort – so a vehicle that would release a projectile of some sort that would ram into a satellite and destroy it”.
But this was less likely because such a physically destructive tool would be capable of creating a lot of debris, Bowen added.
