‘International regulations’ wouldn’t make much of a difference in this context.
Gray-zone warfare does not appear yet to have reached the final frontier, probably because it would be very hard to conceal who was responsible for it, but that does not mean that the Russians and Chinese are forgoing some practice runs, either for that or something worse.
Russia may well be already testing to see what it can get away with.
KOSMOS 2612, a Russian satellite, which was launched in April with little detail (that’s routine enough), has been getting very close to ICEYE X36, an imaging satellite from the U.S. subsidiary of Finnish company Iceye. It has been used by the Ukrainian military, possibly to “look through” clouds and smoke to track and guide activity on the ground below.
Not much is known about what happened, but according to Scientific American and other sources, the Russian satellite may have gotten very close to X36, maybe within a couple of hundred yards, maybe less, raising the prospect of collision, whether accidental or otherwise (the satellites are traveling at around four miles a second). Maneuvers like that, known, to borrow the jargon, as rendezvous and proximity operations (RPOs), are worth noting (and this appears not to have been the only one involving X36), and not just for obvious reasons. They consume propellant and will not be undertaken lightly. The ability to refuel a satellite is still a technology in its relatively early days (China reportedly managed it last year and the U.S. is certainly working on it).
There are few official international regulations related to these types of maneuvers, and conducting one nonconsensually breaks norms and crosses ill-defined lines for mutual safe operations on-orbit, Samson says. Unsolicited RPOs might be interpreted as aggressive—or even as an act of war. And already high tensions on the high frontier now seem set to soar: last month the U.S. Space Force announced that it had placed weapons in space
I doubt that “international regulations” would make much of a difference in this context.
U.S. Undersecretary of State Thomas G. DiNanno called the Russian satellite’s behavior “threatening,” and said the country had been “intentionally maneuvering dangerously close to a commercial satellite, behaviors consistent with on-orbit weapons operations.”
Space historian and former NASA astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell said that he believed it is the first rendezvous in low Earth orbit between two active satellites without one owner’s approval…
Moscow has warned since the first year of its full-scale invasion that Western commercial satellites helping Ukraine could become legitimate military targets.
But that, if only by implication, raises questions for other commercial satellites, whether involved with Ukraine or not, as well as for U.S. government satellites, military or otherwise: How much terrestrial backup do we (or can we) have for the services they render?
The U.S. announced last month that it has “space control weapons” in orbit, an announcement presumably intended to deter hostile anti-satellite operations. It’s speculated that such weapons would be likely to be used in electronic or radio jamming operations rather than anything more destructive, but no one knows for sure.
The militarization of space will continue to grow, and so will the risks of a dangerous “incident,” whether accidental or deliberate. The parallels with the long Cold War stand-off are clear, inevitable, and worrying.