On Sept. 14, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said the quiet part out loud. Speaking at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md., Meink openly conceded something U.S. policymakers have been avoiding acknowledging for years—that the American military intends to weaponize space, and indeed, that it already has hostile hardware in Earth orbit. Weaponization of space has been officially forbidden under international law since Jan. 27, 1967, when the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies—better known simply as the Outer Space Treaty—was signed and ratified by the U.S., the U.K., and the old U.S.S.R.
Since then, 112 other countries have joined the pact. China, which was not remotely a global power at the time the treaty was adopted, signed on to it in 1983. Read more: The Looming Risk of Too Many Satellites and Debris in Space But the agreement has been honored as much in the breach as in the observance—at least by the U.S., China, and modern-day Russia.
As long ago as 1985, the U.S. Air Force shot down a defunct American weather satellite with a missile launched by a military jet flying at 31,500 ft., a first test of a technology that could just as easily be used against the space assets of enemy nations. The Soviet Union experimented with similar R&D beginning in 1983, but did not succeed at it until 2021, when it famously destroyed a Soviet-era satellite with a ground-based missile.
Beijing beat Moscow to the punch 14 years earlier, skeet-shooting a Feng Yun-1C weather satellite out of the sky with a projectile fired by a ground-launched ballistic missile, scoring a hit more than 500 miles up. The U.S. has—officially at least—disavowed and condemned this kind of cosmic escalation. At the time of the Chinese action, senior members of the George W.
Bush administration criticized the move as “very troubling,” “very worrisome,” “destabilizing,” and “quite unpleasant.” A senior Air Force spokesperson told the media flatly, “We don’t want to do that.” But what America ostensibly wants to do and what it has actually been doing are two different things. In 1983, then-President Ronald Reagan announced plans for a tactical umbrella known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which aimed to use missiles that could reach orbital and suborbital space to knock down nuclear and conventional ordnance launched by the Soviet Union and other foes. The program did not quite run afoul of the Outer Space Treaty since it was nominally defensive rather than offensive, though the Kremlin decidedly did not see things that way.
The SDI ran for a decade—until the presidency of Bill Clinton—and produced no technology of note, while burning through an inflation-adjusted $70 billion. Presidents since then have continued to invest in space-based missile defense—though at lower funding levels—with President George W. Bush going so far as to withdraw from the 1972 U.S.-U.S.S.R Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, to pursue the technology without officially breaking America’s diplomatic word.
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