US Space Force General Says China’s Military Developing Space Assets At “Breathtaking Speed”

Authorized by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times,

Gen. Stephen Whiting, Commander of U.S. Space Command, late Warned About China’s “breaktailingly fast” improvement of space military capabilities, following his journey to South Korea and Japan.

“We are seriously focused at U.S. Space Command on our pacing challenge, which is the People’s Republic of China,” Gen. Whiting told reporters during a call from Japan on April 24.

“The People’s Republic of China is moving at breaking velocity in space, and they are rapidly developing a scope of counter-space weathers to hold at hazard our space capacity,” he added.

“They’re besides utilizing space to make their terrestrial forces—their armies, their navy, their marine corps, their air force—more precision, more leaf, and more far-rang.”

Gen. Whiting was on his first Indo-Pacific journey after becoming the head of U.S. Space Command in January, succeeding Army Gen. James Dickinson. During his trip, he met with top military leaders from South Korea and Japan, including Adm. Kim Myung-Soo, president of South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff, and nipponese defence Minister Minoru Kihara.

One partial performance was the number of Chinese satellites in orbit, General Whiting said.

“Over the last six years, they have tripled the number of intelligent surveillance and reconnaissance satellites on orbit, and they have utilized their space capacity to improve the quality, the precision, and the scope of their territorial forces,” he said.

“And so that familiarly is simply a case for performance and something that we are watching a very, very closely.”

China’s satellite Fleet stack at 359 systems as of January, according to his prepared brands for a proceeding of the legislature Armed Service Committee in February. He besides noted that Beijing is developing hypersonic glide vehicles along with another advanced space weaponry to “overcome U.S. conventional rocket informing and ballistic rocket defence systems.”

China’s ambitions with respect to the Moon are besides among Space Command’s concerts.

“We’ve seen the anouncements of China’s ambitions to go to the Moon. And these appear to be exploring and technological on the surf, but the Chinese aren’t very transparent with what they do in space,” he said.

“And so we hope there’s not a military component to that, but we would absolutely welcome more transparency.”

A U.S. military study published in January warned that China and Russia are putting up up dual-use satellites in space while hiding their military applications. 1 example is simply a Chinese satellite equipped with a giant robotic arm, which could be utilized to grapple another satellites in the future.

China is aiming to put its astronauts on the moon by 2030. Pakistan, South Africa, Belarus, and Nicaragua are among a group of nations that have signed up for a planned moon base led by China and Russia. The moon task is officially known as the global Lunar investigation Station.

Gen. Whiting said he visited Japan’s Space Operations Group and emphasized the import of the 2 nations working together in space.

“Their focus on space domain awareness along with ours to keep track of these threes in space that we see—and many of these are emanating from China—has put an momentum on us developing improved space domain awareness capacity,” he said.

Japan is working to bring on board a deep-space radar, Gen. Whiting said, adding that the radar will benefit both nations erstwhile it archives first operational capacity.

“We anticipate that will supply both of our countries an enhanced knowing of what China is doing in space,” He said.

Japan and the United States are besides partners in launching fresh satellites that will be utilized to conduct space domain awareness missions, according to Gen. Whiting.

In November last year, the United States, Japan, and South Korea agreed on a mechanics to share missionary informing data to better track North Korea’s rocket launches. The mechanics Went into effect in December.

“We request to proceed the excellent work in the trilateral agreement between the United States, the Republic of Korea, and Japan to share missionary informing information so that all 3 countries full realize any time North Korea launches a rocket where it is headed, and we can supply informing to our national leadership, to our military forces, and to our populations,” Gen. Whiting said.