The US government has confirmed for the first time that it has deployed orbiting space weapons.
Troy Meink, the Air Force Secretary, acknowledged that America “now has on-orbit space control weapons”, in a sign of the growing importance of space to the US military – and a warning to rival powers.
Meink told the audience at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference in Maryland on Monday that the weapons were capable of defending American forces.
Both China and Russia condemned the move, with a statement from the Chinese ministry of foreign affairs claiming the US was “preparing for war in outer space” and cautioning against turning space “into a battlefield”.
Meink did not give details of the weapons he was referring to, but experts say attacks in space are possible using lasers, projectiles and “jammers” that target satellites controlling vital operations on Earth.
America also has a highly classified space plane, the Boeing X-37B, designed to test and develop new technologies for the Pentagon and Nasa. Analysts believe the secretive plane supports US military operations and could carry equipment, munitions or sensors.
Space weapons could also in theory be used to target ballistic missiles launched on Earth. Donald Trump has pushed the militarisation of space, recalling former president Ronald Reagan’s multibillion-dollar Strategic Defence Initiative programme of the 1980s, dubbed “Star Wars” by critics and media.
Trump reestablished the US Space Force in 2019 and has ordered the Pentagon to create a $175bn “Golden Dome” missile defence system using space-based interceptors – though this is still in the nascent stages.
Space weapons are generally directed at other satellites rather than systems on the ground, says Gabriel ElefteriuHow the weapons could be used
Experts say orbital munitions can have uses including destroying or jamming enemy satellites, firing at targets within the Earth’s atmosphere and in orbit or even grabbing satellites and moving them to a different part of space.
Space weaponry can be kinetic, relying on physical force to damage or destroy a target, or non-kinetic – disrupting a satellite’s operation without physically impacting it, says Gabriel Elefteriu, senior research fellow in space power at the Council on Geostrategy think-tank.
“The non-kinetic ones are mostly electronic warfare systems, so jammers in particular, and lasers you can use to dazzle sensors on satellites,” he told The i Paper.
Space weapons are generally directed at other satellites rather than systems on the ground, because the power required to send jamming signals from orbit to the earth’s surface would be enormous, according to Elefteriu.
He said that a satellite could release a smaller spacecraft that would act as a projectile to strike a target in orbit, but this would create a cloud of dangerous debris. “The Americans, and pretty much any major space power, don’t want to create a lot of debris because that will impact their own satellites, so mostly you want to focus on non-destructive methods.”
Elefteriu said the US was focused on the Boeing X-37B space plane and other emerging technologies to stay ahead of Russia and China. “The X-37B is a robotic space plane that goes up on a rocket and stays up for years at a time,” he said. “The current mission launched in August 2025. It is a very manoeuvrable spacecraft able to change orbits, and able to release all sorts of other payloads, a lot of them classified, obviously.
“The Americans have been experimenting with spacecraft equipped with a variety of advanced systems to allow them to manoeuvre very closely to a target because if you’re carrying a jammer you want to get as close as possible to the target.”
Only America has a working space plane, though what exactly the craft does is shrouded in secrecy despite flying missions since 2010.
“The missions from the space plane have become more transparent over time than they used to be, but it’s still a hugely secretive project,” says Juliana Suess, associate fellow in military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute and expert in space policy. “People have sort of cobbled together details from what they can glean from open-source information and we know that the space plane has placed satellites in orbit but we don’t know anything about its exact capability.”
Technicians inspect the highly classified X-37B space plane at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The plane is believed to be in orbit after its most recent launch in August 2025 (Photo: US Air Force/Michael Stonecypher/DoD/Corbis via Getty Images)Battle for the high ground
Elefteriu says that while the primary reason for going public now may be a warning to Russia and China about US capability, it is also the Trump administration building an argument for more space weapons.
“The Space Force now clearly wants to move into this new stage of space development including deploying the Golden Dome and they want to also deploy more space systems. So, in my reading, this announcement starts preparing the ground for those budgetary requests, to start acknowledging these capabilities in order to ask Congress for much more of them.”
The surprise public announcement comes as the US Space force warns of “intensifying strategic competition” with Russia and China that “presents a serious threat to US national security interests”.
While international space law bans putting weapons of mass destruction in orbit, it doesn’t explicitly ban weapons in space, something that Russia and China have long argued for, submitting a joint resolution to the UN on preventing using force against space objects.
With commercial and military space hardware increasingly linked, any move that could lead to a new arms race in orbit risks vital satellite infrastructure we rely on for communications and commerce.
“We’re moving into an era of orbital warfare, and we need to get our heads around this and we need to start planning around this concept,” says Elefteriu.
Suess sees the decision to speak openly about space weapons as itself part of military strategy. “Space has been a part of conflict for a really long time,” she says. “It has enabled defence capabilities, it has enabled weapons, so the more useful that space assets are to militaries the more vulnerable they become as well.”
While Russia and China are both developing space weapons, analysts say the US is the predominant space power with advanced capabilities including the X-37B space plane.
“The US has the most comprehensive picture of what’s actually happening in space,” adds Suess. “Their space situational awareness is the best at the moment, and the US has a lot of capabilities that they could turn around and turn into a weapon in a relatively short timeframe.
“It’s a bit harder to gauge that for Russia and China.”
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