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The United States has confirmed that it has sent weapons into space, The Guardian has reported.

U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said the country has active “on-orbit” weapons that they have deployed and are now circling the Earth.

“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist,” Meink said early this week at the annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference . “This is why the United States now has, on-orbit, space-control weapons.”

Kinetic weaponry

Meink didn’t go into any specifics of the weaponry, but a spokesperson for U.S. Space Force said control of space could mean “employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities,” adding “these capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes.”

A kinetic weapon uses hyperspeed and mass that turns into devastating force when colliding with its target, destroying it with impact speed and causing destructive shockwaves. Space Force said it’s “no longer science fiction, it’s science fact.

“ A kinetic energy weapon is designed to destroy space assets, either by an intentional collision or by using warheads to destroy them,” it says on its Space Systems Command website. “Along with the possibility of a direct attack on a target spacecraft, kinetic weapons pose an additional, second order threat because fragments of the wrecked satellite and the weapon become space debris and pose a threat to other space vehicles.”

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China, Russia respond

China’s Foreign Ministry said Washington is “preparing for a war in outer space.” Beijing warned the U.S. not to turn space “into a battlefield, as well as an arms race.”

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson at the Kremlin, told media that Russia believes “space must be free of any weapon” and called for “the complete demilitarization of space.”

Experts said the U.S. has accused China and Russia of doing the same thing and it’s far from a secret that all three powers are in a space arms race. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who retired from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics this year, told the Guardian it’s reasonable to assume the U.S. military already has a presence in space as it has deployed a number of satellites with secret payloads. He added it’s also reasonable to assume China and Russia will now “respond in kind.

“In the long run, I find it questionable whether this is in the U.S. national interest and for sure we will see comparable systems from China, if they don’t already have them,” he told the outlet.

The real star wars

The militarization of space began in the 1950s during the Cold War, but in 1967 a number of countries signed the Outer Space Treaty , which banned weapons of mass destruction from space, though there’s no language that stops powers from placing weapons in Earth’s orbit.

The International Space Statio n became a symbol of co-operation after the Cold War, but a new space race has emerged amid tensions with China and Russia, the latter of which caused international concern in 2021 when Russia struck one of its defunct satellites in orbit as part of an anti-satellite missile test. That test caused thousands of pieces of orbital debris.

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