On June 13, the space domain awareness software company COMSPOC observed two Chinese satellites move within 1 km of each other and possibly perform a docking maneuver. The two satellites, SJ-21 and SJ-25, later separated and have since drifted apart more than 120 km.
This move by two Chinese satellites confirms what experts have known for years: Near-peer competitors China and Russia have been developing and practicing techniques, tactics and procedures that are reshaping the operating environment in space and rapidly closing the capability gap in on-orbit maneuver warfare.
Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein recently described a series of maneuvers among five Chinese satellites as “dogfighting in space.” While the idea of dogfighting satellites may invoke images of high-speed maneuvers unfolding in minutes or seconds, a la Star Wars or Top Gun, the reality is different.
“Those engagements [in GEO] take place over two to three days in some cases,” said Clint Clark, VP of first impressions at Exoanalytic Solutions. “The techniques, the behaviors, are like a dogfight. You’re doing a move, a countermove, but it’s not unfolding like you see in the movie Top Gun: Maverick.”
There are various on-orbit tactics that may involve short or sustained movement across orbits, including SIGINT collection, characterization and inspection missions, docking and capture, counter-inspection and even co-orbital ASAT. However, rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) most closely resemble the dogfighting described by Gen. Guetlein.
In its 2025 Space Warfighting framework, the U.S. Space Force (USSF) describes RPO as an operation that “may include purposeful positioning of a spacecraft near or in contact with another spacecraft…for the purposes of defense, offense, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, collection, sustainment, training, research and development or to fulfill other missions.”
Tracking Orbital Encounters
China and Russia have demonstrated various and increasingly sophisticated on-orbit maneuvers in recent years.
“We’re watching as China and Russia are advancing the state of the art of their counterspace technology, and then their tactics, their techniques and procedures [TTPs] for employing that technology,” said Jim Cooper, SSA Solutions Lead at COMSPOC. “They’re getting to a point where what they’re trying to do is sort of test, experiment, wargame and validate all of these TTPs that they’re building and get them ready for operational use. And we’re seeing rapid advancements there.”
“We’re watching as China and Russia are advancing the state of the art of their counterspace technology.” -Jim Cooper, COMSPOC
The Luch Olymp satellites typify this activity by Russia. The maneuverable spy satellites have been observed closely stalking western birds across the GEO belt, presumably collecting signals intelligence. More recently, Russia deployed a trio of satellites in near-polar orbit, Kosmos 2581, 2582 and 2583 that were said to be conducting RPO activities and space warfare drills. Another satellite, Kosmos 2588, is sparking concerns after arriving in close proximity to a U.S. military satellite, prompting concerns of regular flybys and possibilities of a co-orbital ASAT weapon.
China has demonstrated highly sophisticated counterspace tactics, including rendezvous and proximity operations, and appears to be accelerating the tempo of on-orbit exercises. Some of the more notable examples from recent years include Shijian-21 circling, grappling and towing a defunct weather satellite into graveyard orbit in 2022 and recent dogfighting maneuvers among multiple satellites.
China’s Top Gun Moment
Currently, the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP), originally launched in 2014, is the core of the known U.S. fleet of maneuverable satellites. In 2022, the GSSAP satellite, US-270, had an unusual encounter when approaching China’s Shiyan 12-01 and Shiyan 12-02 satellites in GEO. The approach was likely intended to scope out the Chinese satellites, but as US-270 closed in on Shiyan 12-02, it slowed down dramatically, causing US-270 to overshoot. As the U.S. satellite whizzed by, Shiyan 12-02’s new position, directly in front of the sun, likely prevented US-270 from capturing images but gave the Chinese satellite a favorable angle.
“This is the space equivalent of the first Top Gun movie, albeit over the course of one to two days, as opposed to minutes and seconds,” Cooper noted, referring to the character Maverick’s classic brake-and-shoot maneuver. “The end effect is the same. They are gaining an advantage. They are outmaneuvering. They are getting inside the U.S. observe, orient, decide and act—the OODA loop.”
A visualization by COMSPOC based on commercial SDA data showing proximity operations between a U.S. and two Chinese satellites. The characterization of the mission and payload of each spacecraft is based on open-source information or conjecture. (Source: COMSPOC)
After US-270 passed Shiyan 12-02, the second Chinese satellite also threw on the brakes and US-270 overshot again, forcing it to perform a new maneuver to lower its altitude and drift back to reengage the Chinese spacecraft again.
These countermeasures show a sophisticated chain of operations and decision-making that unfolded over time, at high speeds and vast distances. “Over the course of about one day, China was able to detect [the U.S.] maneuver, track the satellite, take the observational data and use processing and fusion software to generate the space domain awareness necessary to understand what the U.S. satellite was trying to do,” Cooper explained. From there, the Chinese selected a course of reaction as a countermeasure, uploaded that through command and control to ultimately counter the U.S. approach.
Strategic Implications: New Era of Maneuver Warfare
Strategically, what these new capabilities suggest is that we’re not in Kepler’s universe anymore, so to speak. The space environment is no longer a place where objects always passively follow the laws of planetary motion—except for occasional station-keeping maneuvers. According to Christopher Stone, senior fellow for space deterrence at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies, this change signifies a new era of space warfare.
“I think this leads to a movement away from positional warfare to maneuver warfare,” he said. “For the most part, we’ve always had constellations in a certain orbit, certain altitude, certain inclination to do certain terrestrial support missions. Now, with these maneuverable vehicles, they are not only exploiting different propulsion systems that are lighter, smaller, cheaper, they will do a bunch of big maneuvers, or they can drop a weapon off like we’re seeing [with co-orbital ASATs]. So, I think maneuver warfare is becoming the preferred mode of operation.”
“Maneuver warfare is becoming the preferred mode of operation.” -Christopher Stone, National Institute for Deterrence Studies
Stone, who also hosts the Real Space Strategy podcast, recently raised the issue of positional space operations with Retired USSF Lt. Gen. John Shaw. According to Shaw, Keplerian laws of planetary motion may be beautiful, but they are also the “greatest curse” when it comes to defending against an adversary in space. With a satellite in a fixed orbit, “an adversary knows exactly where [it’s] going to be in a day or a week…unless it’s maneuvering at a tempo that actually really now imposes a cost on the adversary. We don’t do that today.”
The goal, as stated by USSF officials, is to gain the ability to “maneuver without regret,” to move without fear of losing fuel or mission time, to evade attacks or threaten adversarial satellites if necessary. Maneuvering without regret also implies the ability to impose costs on an adversary or gain an operational advantage by forcing them to respond in a way that they lose fuel, mission time or other capabilities.
Achieving this effect hinges on advancements in space mobility and logistics. Governments and commercial companies have been ramping up investments and demonstrations in this area, as well as in-orbit SDA and in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM). These programs include refueling, life extension programs and advancements in various chemical, electric, solar and nuclear propulsion systems.
The Math Is Crucial
Satellite propulsion systems and in-orbit logistics are essential to maneuver operations, but space domain awareness remains foundational to detect, characterize and ultimately respond to novel threats in orbit.
Accurate, complete, timely and responsive SDA information is of the essence. Consider the steps needed to respond to a potentially hostile maneuver by an adversarial satellite: The operator needs a baseline background picture of the operating environment with the ability to detect a change. Once a change is detected, the operator needs to be able to track, process and fuse the relevant data to understand the situation.
If it’s a familiar situation, the operator may have a preplanned countermeasure ready to upload to command and control. If it’s a new situation, the operator may have to run models or consider more analytics before executing a countermeasure. All of this takes time, precision, doctrine, training and coordination to execute.
“I don’t think anyone would argue we’re good at this right now,” said Cooper, acknowledging guardians are making progress with “reps and sets” and more routinized operations through exercises like the Shriever Wargames, Global Sentinel and others.
Part of the challenge is the way legacy DoD systems pull together the SDA picture. Those systems were designed around old requirements and assumptions about objects in fixed orbits, not the current reality of orbital warfare.
“The math on this is crucial,” Cooper explained. Legacy DoD systems use a batch least squares (BLS) algorithm for SDA tracking, which will look at a batch of data and show the best-fit orbit for the entire data set, which is fine for stable orbits but cannot account for dramatic changes, like orbital maneuvers. Operations in other domains, as well as certain commercial SDA providers, use a Kalman filter-based solution, a recursive algorithm that continuously updates its estimates of state and uncertainty as new data is available, offering a real-time, evolving picture that tends to be more accurate.
With BLS, or “the old math,” it can take three to four orbit revolutions to see an estimate of pre-maneuver to post-maneuver, which can mean three to four days of lag time for GEO and seven to nine hours in LEO, Cooper continued. “That’s a lot of time for things, bad things to be happening while you’re just trying to figure out what’s going on.”
Because the Kalman filter offers responsive situational awareness, it is used by every other service branch for operations on land, sea and air. However, old views of the space operating environment persist in legacy technologies. Even as rhetoric has improved around the prevailing international view of space as a warfighting domain, it is taking time to bring systems, doctrine and policies in line.
“We have to get away from that positional idea of space that we have grown up with,” Cooper said. “We need to understand there’s a lot that can happen up here, a lot of tactics, techniques and procedures, capabilities and countermeasures. It is happening. And Russia and China are exploiting that. So, we need to get there.”
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