"China is replacing Russia as the No. 2 space power," Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., told Breaking Defense.

WASHINGTON — While the US led the world in the total number of space launches in 2022 with China coming in second, a new report calls China the winner for the most defense-related payloads.

“China is replacing Russia as the No. 2 space power,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and author of the “Space Activities in 2022” report [PDF], told Breaking Defense Thursday. McDowell is also the author of the online newsletter “Jonathan’s Space Report,” which chronicles worldwide space launches.

The US attempted 78 launches in 2022, with 72 of them successful, according to the report published Tuesday. Russia successfully launched 21. China attempted to launch 64, and 62 made orbit.For each country, many of those launches carried multiple satellites. For specifically defense-related satellites, the report finds that China orbited 45, the US 30 and Russia 15.

The caveat is that it is hard to be certain about the number of Chinese military satellites, the report stresses, because of Beijing’s veil of secrecy surrounding its national security space efforts. For example, the report notes that eight Shiyan satellites were successfully launched to low Earth orbit in 2022 with unknown missions. “The Shiyan (‘Test’) satellites are a cover name for various Chinese government satellites,” the report explains.

While the statistic regarding China’s defense-related payloads is likely to raise blood pressures across the US national security community, an equally important finding of the annual report is that the number of launches and satellites going into orbit in general continues to skyrocket at an ever increasing rate — primarily do to a surge in commercial activities.

“Generally, space traffic is shooting up (pun intended),” McDowell said.



More surprisingly, said McDowell, is that the number of commercial satellites launched by China is “rapidly increasing.” Of 182 total satellites launched by Beijing, 100 (55 percent) were commercial class, the report shows.

“This is maybe the biggest news that isn’t being much talked about,” he added

Originally Posted By elterrible987⏩