In case you’ve been living under a rock lately and missed the big announcement, Australia recently committed to ‘never conduct destructive, direct-ascent anti-satellite missile testing’.
Why would we do that? Well, for starters New Zealand have already committed and we don’t want to look like we are less progressive than them. Then again, they do have a space program that is advanced enough that they can actually launch rockets and things that could potentially carry ASATs (anti-satellite weapons) – we don’t. We did launch a few sounding rockets from Arnhem Land (sorry, the Arnhem Space Centre) a few months ago, and there’s no doubt that Gilmour Space will meet their launch date of April 2023 for an Australian-made orbital spacecraft (these things rarely get delayed). But as things stand, we don’t actually have the capability to launch or test ASATs.
(By the way, if you’re thinking ‘what about WRESAT’, yes that was an Australian satellite, but it launched on an American Redstone rocket, so it might not count towards our commitment on a technicality.)
Still, ‘never’ is a long time. Why are we so confident we are never going to want to test these things? Probably because our good friends, the Americans, already have all the data and technology that they (we) need to build whatever type of ASAT we (and them, of course) want very quickly, no further testing needed. And note that the commitment says nothing about not using ASATs, as long as they are not being ‘tested’. It also says nothing about other types of ASATs – those armed with lasers or jammers, and those that are co-orbital and intercept their target rather than being direct-ascent, for example.
Of course, the whole ASAT ban idea was originally that of the US (the good guys), and came about because they were a bit upset when Russia (the bad guys) blew up one of its own satellites in 2021 creating a cloud of about 1,500 pieces of space debris. Shocking, right. I mean, when the US used an ASAT in 2008 to destroy one of its own spy satellites (complete with secret onboard gadgets) that had malfunctioned and may have come down in Russian territory, they had a really, really good reason to do so. Not to mention that they (the good guys?) basically started the whole ASAT arms race after the Soviet launch of Sputnik created fear within the US that they (the bad guys) could use that same technology (the technology that put a metal sphere that went ‘beep, beep’ into orbit for a whole 2 months) to create an orbital network of nuclear-armed satellites.
Need I mention that none of Russia, China and India (the 3 other nations to have used ASATs and contributed to the ever-growing space junk problem) have committed to the commitment – at the very least they remain non-committal. Perhaps because Russia and China put forward a similar proposal in 2008 to prohibit the deployment of weapons in space. The position of the US at the time was clear – no, thank you.
TL;DR – Australia has agreed not to do something we are not capable of doing because we have powerful friends to do the dirty work
