As space race escalates, Moscow vows to retaliate for US missile deaths

(Originally published June 25 in “What in the World“) While its own missiles continue to rain down over Ukraine, Russia on Monday vowed to retaliate against the United States for supplying the missiles Ukraine used over the weekend to attack Russians in occupied Crimea.

Ukrainian forces on Sunday used long-range Atacms against a Russian missile launcher near Sevastopol. Russian air-defense missiles knocked down the U.S.-supplied Atacm, which rained shrapnel down on a nearby beach, killing at least four people, two of them children. Russia, which annexed Crimea illegally in 2014, described the children as Russian. The Kremlin summoned the U.S. ambassador, accused the U.S. of becoming party to the conflict and vowed “retaliatory measures.”

Washington denied Russian allegations that it helped Ukrainian forces target the site. Biden in February lifted his restriction against sending Kyiv the Army Tactical Missile System, secretly shipping them to Ukraine. But the White House hasn’t lifted its restriction on firing the Atacms across the border into Russia to hit military targets there, even after allowing Ukraine to use its other U.S.-supplied weapons to target attacking Russian forces anywhere inside Russia they may be.

Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, is urging the White House to drop that restraint. Zelensky wants to use the Atacms to strike Russian airbases that lie beyond the range of his other American weaponry. Those airbases are being used to launch bombing raids of Ukrainian cities.

While Ukraine has been using home-made drones to attack those bases and Russia’s infrastructure, it can in theory also reach such targets using British and European Storm Shadow cruise missiles. While the Atacms have a range of 300km, the Storm Shadows can reach targets as far as 550km away.

The U.S., meanwhile, is working to improve its own air defenses, building a network of satellites to help spot incoming missiles. The U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency has a plan to put at least 1,000 military satellites into orbit by 2026. It’s up to 33 so far. Among its plans is an Overhead Persistent Infrared network (or Opir) of four missile-tracking satellites—two in geosynchronous orbits and two in elliptical polar orbits.

The satellites are being developed by the same companies that provide the Pentagon with its missiles, launchers, and jets, and that are building a new network of geostationary climatological satellites for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon) for the two geosynchronous satellites and Northrop Grumman with BAE Systems for the two polar satellites.

The Opir network is designed to replace the existing six satellites that make up the Space-Based Infrared System, or SBIRS. The last of the six satellites was launched into orbit in 2022.

This underscores the Pentagon’s alarm over the news last month that Moscow launched what it believes is a “satellite killer” into low-Earth orbit.