This post is also available in:
עברית (Hebrew)
China’s PLA released a study stating that Chinese submarines equipped with lasers could soon potentially disable Starlink satellites, which would significantly enhance China’s defense capabilities and expand the range of its missions.
The technological advancement is a submarine with a megawatt-class solid-state laser weapon installed in its midsection that can remain submerged while raising a retractable “optoelectronic mast” to fire at satellites before diving back down, as was reported by the South China Morning Post.
Wang Dan, a professor at the Naval Submarine Academy, explained that a “laser attack submarine” could potentially be mass-produced and deployed across various oceans to counter military threats to China, a concept that was detailed in a paper published last month by the project team.
According to Interesting Engineering, the main difficulty with anti-satellite missions is not just being able to target the satellite, but also conceal the attack. The researchers themselves noted that while today’s main method for combating satellites is using surface-to-air missiles, this approach has many issues of stealth and concealment – missile launches produce long plumes of smoke that can easily reveal the position of the attacker, therefore it is considered “too risky” to conduct such attacks from the surface.
Another issue is the size of current satellites, which are getting increasingly smaller. The researchers explain that the satellites in the Starlink network are small and are densely packed in large numbers, meaning the network is highly resilient – they can be easily replaced even if many of them are destroyed, so it is highly inefficient to attack them using missiles.
The study explains that in using the technology, first one or more submarines equipped with laser weapons are deployed to the designated operational area and enter the target zone to wait for the satellites to enter their attack range (previously recorded satellite overflight schedules indicate the timing for raising the weapon) after which the laser weapon is raised.
Certain limitations of the submarine’s tracking devices require additional support to provide information on the satellite position for the attack. When the attack is completed, the submarine can resubmerge and return to its home port or stay for another mission.
