Washington and Beijing are making efforts to avoid a crisis in space before it happens. The US and China have set up a direct link — or “hotline” — allowing both nations to easily share information about activities in space. Specifically, the so-called space hotline is designed to help the space and military agencies of both countries to discuss “potential collisions, approaches, or tests,” according to the Financial Times.
The US and China now have a ‘space hotline’ to avoid satellite warfare
Like the well-known “red telephone,” set up between Moscow and Washington in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the idea is to keep a misunderstanding or other miscommunication from escalating to a dangerous situation in space and here on Earth.
According to a US assistant secretary of state, before the hotline, “we had to send notifications to the Chinese via their ministry of foreign affairs. The chain would go from JSpOC [Joint Space Operations Center] to the Pentagon, to the State Department, to the US Embassy in Beijing, and then on to a contact there.”
A similar, dedicated space hotline has existed between Russia and the US since the Cold War, but such a system is just now being set up with China, a growing power in space. There have been growing fears of warfare in space since China blew up a satellite during a test of an anti-satellite weapons system in 2007. In a time of warfare, destroying orbiting satellites could provide a significant advantage by disabling coordination abilities and intelligence efforts.
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