Russian space agency to initiate talks on banning anti-satellite weapon tests

«Roscosmos plans to initiate international negotiations with the aim of banning full-scale anti-satellite weapon tests held by way of destroying spacecraft and littering low orbits,» Rogozin said at the Central Research Institute of Machine-Building (TsNIImash, Roscosmos’s leading research organization).

The Roscosmos chief said he was concerned over these tests as satellite fragments «may destroy the station.»

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a televised address to the nation on March 27 said the country’s military had successfully tested its own anti-satellite weapon to hit a satellite in a low near-Earth orbit.

Modi said that after that test India entered the group of space superpowers to take a place next to the United States, Russia, and China. The weapon was developed by India’s Defense Research and Development Organization. The interceptor missile was launched from a test site on the Abdul Kalam Island in the Bay of Bengal off the east coast of the State of Odisha. India used its own satellite as a target.

Senior Assistant to the section chief at Russia’s Space Situation Reconnaissance Center Roman Fattakhov later said that India’s anti-satellite weapon test had caused the space apparatus’s destruction and produced more than 100 fragments that might endanger the International Space Station.