At its covert Korla facility in northern Xinjiang, China may be constructing anti-satellite ground-based lasers that could be used to hide its private military satellites from the prying eyes of international spy satellite missions.
Army Technology reported that satellite imagery of China’s Korla East Test from geospatial intelligence company BlackSky shows two laser gimbals housed in hangars with retractable roofs opening around solar noon when foreign imaging satellites are most active.
Army Technology mentions that the Korla platform has electric pulse and airplane services in addition to ground-based anti-satellite laser.
According to the report, the satellite imagery of Korla reveals enormous anti-satellite lasers that are nearly the size of ship-mounted weapons, along with domed structures that probably contain the gas needed to power the laser operations.
The Korla platform was constructed by China in 2003, but little has been known about its activities since 2005. Unit 63655 of the People’s Liberation Army – Strategic Support Force ( PLA-SSF ), which is in charge of research on lasers and optics, very large stratospheric airships, and high-powered microwaves is responsible for running Korla.
In a December 2022 article for Arms Control Wonk, Eli Hayes writes about China’s Bohu facility in Xinjiang, which satellite imagery shows may have been built in 2002 and became operational in 2004, suggesting that China’s anti-satellite laser program may already be two decades old.
Similar to Korla, Hayes points out that Bohu houses research on lasers and optics, enormous meteoric airship, and high-powered microwaves. Unit 63655 of the PLA – SSF is in charge of running the facility.
In a separate article, Hayes mentions that satellite imagery shows that the Bohu site has fixed lasers for ranging and mobile truck-mounted lasers for dazzling.
According to Hayes, these developments indicate that China has only a limited capacity for anti-satellite directed power arms solutions. He does, however, issue a warning that such evaluations should be viewed with extreme caution due to the dearth of data and the ineffectiveness of beams in anti-satellite services.
China is not the only nation to construct specialized floor defenses for anti-satellite war. The Kalina laser hospital in Russia, which is located in the Caucasus and aims to flood many countries’ spy satellites with laser light, was the subject of a report by Asia Times in July.
By producing 1, 000 kilowatts per square centimeter in thermal pulse manner, the Kalina service emits a significant amount of light at spy satellites’ low Earth orbits.
Kalina may shield a 100,000 square kilometer area from spy satellites by aiming an overhead telescope for hundreds of kilometers using an aperture five meters in diameter.
However, Kalina’s operational status is ambiguous because imports of necessary delicate devices may have been hampered by sanctions since 2014. The environment may have gotten worse as a result of the restrictions Russia was subjected to following the invasion of Ukraine in February.
A ground-based light you precisely target specific factors on low-earth circle satellites to remove or eliminate them by thermal problems, according to Zhenhua Liu and some authors in a 2020 article published in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series.
Ground-based lasers, according to Liu and others, can overheat delicate satellite electronics, burn out their thermal panels, or partially blind or completely disable the visual sensors on satellites.
They also claim that anti-satellite lasers have undergone extensive testing by space powers like China, Russia, and the US and currently have initial functional capabilities. They point out that ground-based lasers have advantages over flying and satellite-mounted weapons in terms of size, protection, and power.
It can be difficult to react to potential ground-based laser disturbance against satellites because it is difficult to tell the difference between a satellite being carelessly ranging and an intentional attack.
While satellite light varying is a widely used method to determine the orbits of area objects with great precision, Yousaf Butt points out in an article published in the peer-reviewed Science and Global Security journal that there is some possibility that satellite rangefinding lasers may harm private visual sensors, leading to the possibility of being misinterpreted as an attack.
Ground-based anti-satellite laser can also be used to conceal private military services, such as nuclear weapon warehouses, Chris Zappone notes in an essay for The Sydney Morning Herald in August 2021. The author speculates that for laser-protected naval and air bases might serve as staging grounds for an invasion of Taiwan.
Zappone also points out some benefits of ground-based anti-satellite lasers, such as their scalability and plausible deniability while also being able to destroy satellites. He talks about how challenging it is to pinpoint a yard laser attack that is blindingly close to Earth and traveling at thousands of kilometers per second. This is because temporary satellite outages can be unintentional or the result of difficult-to-detect aggression.
He does, however, issue a warning that interfering with satellites, particularly those used for missile defense, could be seen as setting up for an impending nuclear attack, leading to unexpected escalation and possible catastrophe.
According to Zappone, damage from ground-based light attacks on satellites can have effects that go beyond military ones because they now serve as the nerve centers of conventional military operations as well as many human tasks like routing, weather forecasting, and space based timing for commercial transactions.