A retired US Air Force and intelligence officer has recently revealed that India’s anti-satellite missile test (ASAT) in space in 2019 caught the American security agencies completely off guard and made them look for any threat to their space assets.Former National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) officer David Grusch, on the Joe Rogan podcast show recently, recalled the moment India conducted the ASAT on March 27, 2019, saying, “It is a crazy story… There was an unexpected Indian missile test that hit one of their own defunct weather satellites in 2019. And they didn’t tell us.”India had then issued a NOTAM (notice to airmen) off the Odisha coast, meaning the US was aware that a missile would be tested. However, it never anticipated it would be an ASAT missile. Grusch, who was then on duty at the NRO operations centre, recounted the frantic scenes at his office after the test. “I remember in my office, I had like all these different phones. I am like calling the embassy… I am like, what the f**k? They did not tell us. We were worried at the end of the row about the debris as we fly spy satellites.”NRO is an agency of the US department of defense that designs, builds, launches and operates the intelligence satellites of US federal govt. Soon after the test, Grusch rushed to brief the NRO director. “I ran up to the director’s office in my uniform, you know, out of breath. I am like, holy sh*t,” he said.During the director’s briefing, he was told to assess any damage. “I am like going to the orbital analysts on the watch floor with all the crazy screens, like, calculate the debris field, let me know if we have to manoeuvre something,” he said.The world was clueless about DRDO’s missile test in space until PM Narendra Modi made the announcement about ‘Mission Shakti’ in a morning national address.The defunct satellite that was destroyed was Microsat-R. The test made India the fourth country after the US, Russia and China with a rare capability to hit and destroy satellites in space.The then Nasa administrator Jim Bridenstine criticised the test, calling it a “terrible, terrible thing” that endangered astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). As per Nasa’s estimates, India’s test generated roughly 400 pieces of orbital debris, including 24 pieces that rose into apogees higher than the ISS orbit.However, the US ignored the fact that it itself had conducted a slew of such space tests in the past: It had conducted two successful destructive kinetic direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) intercept tests against orbiting satellites in September 1985 and February 2008.It also recently confirmed for the first time that it has deployed a designated space weapon in orbit to counter rising threats from adversary satellites.
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