Chinese submarines armed with lasers could take out SpaceX’s Starlink satellites if China’s security was at risk, according to a study by People’s Liberation Army (PLA) scientists.
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In the study, a submarine with a megawatt-class, solid-state, laser weapon installed in its midsection could stay submerged while it raised a retractable, “optoelectronic mast” to fire at satellites, before diving back down to depth.
This type of laser attack submarine could be mass-produced in the future and deployed in various oceans to counter military threats to China, said the project team led by Wang Dan, a professor with the Naval Submarine Academy, in a peer-reviewed paper published last month in the Chinese-language journal, Command Control & Simulation.
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For anti-satellite missions, the biggest challenge was not hitting the satellite, but hiding the attack, the scientists said.
“Currently, the primary means of anti-satellite operations relies on ground-to-air missiles, but this approach has certain issues, mainly in terms of concealment,” Wang and her colleagues wrote.
