US and China set up 'space hotline'

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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/900870f4-8f9f-11e5-a549-b89a1dfede9b.html

US and China set up ‘space hotline’
Sam Jones, Defence and Security Editor
November 20, 2015 6:23 pm

Washington and Beijing have established an emergency “space hotline” to reduce the risk of accidental conflict.

As fears grow of an orbital arms race, the new communications channel between the US and China — like the nuclear hotlines of the cold war — will serve as a diplomatic safety valve. By sharing technical information, officials hope that misunderstandings can be avoided and problems quickly resolved.

Washington already has a space hotline with Moscow as a legacy of the cold war.

China has ramped up the testing of weapons designed to knock out almost all US high-tech military capabilities by targeting the orbital networks they depend on.

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1. A new arms race in our skies threatens the satellites that control everything from security to commu

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/637bf054-8e34-11e5-8be4-3506bf20cc2b.html

Satellite wars

A new arms race in our skies threatens the satellites that control everything from security to communications

Sam Jones
November 20, 2015 10:39 am

An unlikely memorial runs across the middle of the marketplace in Kettering — an otherwise unremarkable English market town. This slab of granite, set into the paving as part of a timeline of local history, reads “Russian Satellites: Grammar School Beats Nasa”. Etched into the stone is the distinctive outline of a sputnik orbiter.

Kettering Grammar School — like the space race — is long gone. But for a period it was on the front line of the extraterrestrial battle between Washington and Moscow. The Kettering Group — the school’s enthusiastic science masters and their eager pupils — became the world’s foremost amateur satellite sleuths, tracking secret Soviet launches and uncovering the location of a previously secret Russian cosmodrome from the workaday shire town.

As the cold war passed into history, so did the group. Geoff Perry, the main teacher and leader, died in 2000. But some of his former pupils never lost their enthusiasm for tracking the orbits of satellites in the skies above us. In 2014, an email from one of them hit my inbox. Did I know much about satellites, it asked? Perhaps I should look into this curious new object?

“In May 2014 there was a regular Russian rocket launch that put four satellites up into orbit,” recalls Bob Christy, a former Kettering pupil. “But one of them wasn’t the same as the others.” Three — as had been publicly declared — were Rodnik communications satellites. The fourth, though, was something quite else. Officially it was classified on the Pentagon’s public space database as orbital junk. But then it began to manoeuvre. “It moved away from the others,” says Christy. “And then we watched it put itself on a trajectory to catch up again with the rocket booster that launched it. It was some kind of test.”

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