Remember when Donald Trump did the whole Space Force thing? Yeah, turns out there might be a reason for that. A website dedicated to US military developments reports that the United States’ Defense Department is debating whether to declassify “…the existence of a secret space weapon program and providing a real-world demonstration of its capabilities.”
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Which sounds a lot more awesome than it actually is, at least according to the website Breaking Defense. It doesn’t seem much like rockets or lasers (okay, maybe lasers) or a Mass Relay or anything like that — apparently the US military has been working on an anti-satellite technology that it was considering showing off at the National Space Symposium this week.
That isn’t about to happen, for rather obvious reasons, but it might happen sooner rather than later. The actual space weaponry was almost revealed when Donald Trump was still the president of the States, also at the National Space Symposium, but COVID-19 burst that particular plan’s bubble.
Little is know about the project. It was developed under the Special Access Program designation, which is the sort of thing you see in movies. Only a few senior US government members were made aware of its existence during development, but it might be ready to show off to the world.
What form that takes is unknown. The demonstration might include “…an active defence capability to degrade or destroy a target satellite and/or spacecraft” but it’s unclear whether the system will be ground-based (using lasers to blind missiles, satellites and spacecraft) or if it will entail satellite-mounted jamming systems or so-called ‘bodyguard’ satellites that are able to protect orbital craft considered particularly important. These are all speculated possibilities. We’re almost certainly not going to see a kinetic bombardment weapons platform like the ODIN space station above (seen in Call of Duty: Ghosts) revealed. Still, it looks like the reality of war in space is creeping ever closer.
Source: Breaking Defense