In the midafternoon of January 11, 2007, US Air Force major general William Shelton sat at the head of a table in a command center at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, holding a telephone to each ear. Shelton was the commander in charge of maintaining the US military’s “situational awareness” in space—and the situation, at the moment, seemed to be deteriorating fast. One phone connected Shelton to his boss, the head of US Strategic Command, in Nebraska; the other connected to Shelton’s operations center, a windowless room full of analysts just next door. In front of Shelton was a can of Diet Dr Pepper, and arrayed around the table were the members of his increasingly nervous senior staff.
For days, US intelligence had been picking up indications that China was about to conduct a missile test aimed at outer space[1]. The analysts next door—and their counterparts around the world—were tracking ground-based radar signals, monitoring infrared sensors, and poring over images from telescopes in space. All of them were briefing Shelton on what they were observing in real time. At 2:28 pm (PST) their readouts showed a ballistic missile taking off from China’s Xichang Satellite Launch Center, located in the wooded mountains of Sichuan province. The missile rose into low Earth orbit, about 500 miles above Earth’s surface, and appeared to close in on an aging Chinese weather satellite.
Then the telescopes showed a bright flash.
Minutes later, the radar screens began to track a growing cloud of debris—at least 3,000 pieces of shrapnel that would each, Shelton knew, spend the next several years slingshotting around Earth at speeds that could far exceed that of a bullet. Shelton was stunned. The Chinese had just shot a satellite out of the sky.
Not only was this