After attending the opening ceremony of the Chinese National Games, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited a classified PLA base in Shaanxi on Sept. 16 and made a rare reference to space construction.
Xi Jinping pointed out that space assets are national strategic assets that must be managed and used, and more importantly, protected. And it is necessary to comprehensively strengthen the building of protection forces, and improve disaster tolerance backup, anti-destroy survival, and information protection capabilities. It is necessary to strengthen the management of space traffic to ensure the stable and orderly operation of the space system. It is necessary to carry out international cooperation in space security and improve the effectiveness of space crisis management and comprehensive management, according to a report by the Chinese state media Xinhua News Agency.
According to analysis, Xi’s inspection may be of the Xi’an Satellite Measurement and Control Center, known within the Chinese military as the PLA’s 26th Experimental Training Base (Unit 63750), which is under the newly established PLA Strategic Support Force and is the operation, control and management center of China’s space measurement and control network, mainly responsible for spacecraft launch monitoring, tracking and measurement, data transmission, information processing and recovery tasks.
It is understood that this is Xi Jinping’s first public inspection of China’s Strategic Support Force, which was established on Dec. 31, 2015, and is seen as the direct management body of the PLA’s “sky force”; at the same time, Xi Jinping also called for strengthening the construction of protective forces against a background of growing Chinese space assets in orbit, operating satellites and other spacecraft that are said to have surpassed Russia and are second only to the United States; and secondly, the United States and other major powers have set up a Space Force, one of whose goals is to seek the ability to destroy other countries’ spacecraft, which China has to defend against.
The insignia of the Strategic Support Unit consists of “wheat ears, Bayi pentagram (八一), triangular arrow, satellite or electronic cloud orbit”, suggesting that the unit may be tasked with electronic countermeasures, cyber attack and defense, space warfare, etc.
In March, China’s Yunhai 1-02 satellite suddenly disintegrated, believed to have been hit by debris from the abandoned U.S. NOAA-17 satellite.