Pentagon Confirms Space-Based Weapons Are Deployed as 55 Nations Race to Build Spy Satellites

Two Announcements, One Arms Race

Since Maxar Technologies cut Ukraine's satellite feed for roughly a week in March 2025, on a directive from the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, at least 55 nations have launched their own sovereign military satellite programs, according to Novaspace CEO Pacôme Révillon. He presented the figures Tuesday at the Space Defense and Security Summit in Paris.

That lesson landed hard on allied defense ministries: intelligence borrowed from Washington can disappear when Washington's priorities shift. Novaspace's forecast shows defense-owned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance satellites launching between 2026 and 2035 will hit 2,306, up from 485 in the prior decade, according to Tech Times. That's nearly a fivefold jump, decade over decade.

"ISR is obviously a key priority currently for most nations," Révillon told delegates, according to Tech Times. "It's clearly a world that was already largely transparent, but the direction is as much for a diversification of assets for real-time and persistent intelligence."

One day earlier, at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink made a separate but related announcement: the United States has weapons already in orbit.

"Today we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist," Meink told the conference, according to CNN. "This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action."

Meink gave no specifics and declined to elaborate when pressed, according to both CNN and The Guardian. A Space Force spokesperson told The Guardian that "space control" can mean "employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities," for offensive or defensive purposes.

Beijing and Moscow Push Back

China's foreign ministry responded that Washington was "preparing for war in outer space" and warned against turning space into "a battlefield, as well as an arms race there," The Guardian reported. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia believes "space must be free of any weapon" and called for "complete demilitarisation of space."

Both objections merit examination even as both countries build their own capabilities. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who spent decades cataloging rocket launches at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told The Guardian it was reasonable to assume the U.S. already had jamming weapons in orbit, and that China and Russia will now "respond in kind." Victoria Samson of the Secure World Foundation called the Meink admission unprecedented: "I don't think any US government official has ever said that before."

The Chinese side isn't sitting still on the intelligence-gathering front either. Scientists at the Beijing Institute of Technology ran satellite proximity simulations designed to extend observation of U.S. assets in geostationary orbit, including missile-warning satellites, according to a study reported by The Debrief. The same researchers accused the U.S. Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program of running "hundreds of maneuvers" and close observation operations on Chinese satellites since 2014, including a specific 2021 incident involving a U.S. craft they call USA-271. A U.S. Space Command spokesperson told The Debrief it had "nothing additional to add" on the specific accusation.

A Genuine Contradiction Worth Naming

Amid all this, President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that Chinese spying on the U.S. was no different from America's own intelligence work, according to Fox News. "They basically do what we do," Trump said, adding that Xi Jinping had "behaved reasonably well." That comment sits uneasily next to U.S. Space Command chief Gen. Stephen Whiting's public warnings that China is moving at "jaw-dropping speed" to build kill chains and orbital weapons, as reported by the Daily Wire. Whiting has also said China's military researchers are patenting satellites equipped with capture nets and autonomous dogfighting maneuvers. The administration's rhetoric and its own military's threat assessment diverge significantly on this point.

What's Still Unknown

Neither Meink nor the Space Force has disclosed what the deployed weapons are, when they went up, or what they cost taxpayers. Congress has not announced any hearing specifically on the orbital weapons disclosure. With Novaspace projecting a fivefold surge in military satellite launches through 2035 across dozens of countries, the next test is whether that spending gets real oversight, or whether "space control" stays classified while the bill quietly grows.