Time reports:

American intelligence analysts have been watching a pair of Russian satellites, identified as Cosmos 2542 and 2543, for months. Or rather, they have been watching them since they were one satellite, deployed by a Soyuz rocket that took off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on Nov. 26, 2019. It was 11 days after that launch that the first satellite split in two, the second somehow “birthed” from the other, and no one in the U.S. military was happy about the new arrival. By mid-January, both Russian satellites had floated near a multibillion–dollar spacecraft known as KH-11, one of the U.S. military’s most powerful spy tools, part of a reconnaissance constellation code-named Keyhole/-CRYSTAL. It wasn’t clear whether the Cosmos satellites were threatening or surveilling the KH-11, which is said to have the resolving power of the Hubble Space Telescope, but it turned out that was only the start of the twins’ surprises.

After the U.S. expressed concern to Moscow through diplomatic channels early this year, the pair pulled away from the KH-11 and whizzed around the Earth at more than 17,000 m.p.h. Then, on July 15, with the U.S. analysts still tracking them, the “birthed” Russian satellite, Cosmos 2543, fired a projectile into outer space, General John “Jay” Raymond, the top general of the newly created U.S. Space Force, told TIME. It was the first time the U.S. military has publicly alleged an instance of a space-based antisatellite weapons test, a troubling new development in the emerging theater of orbital warfare.

To Raymond and supporters of Space Force, which is the first new branch of the U.S. military in 72 years, Moscow’s “nesting doll” satellites, as the military has labeled the Cosmos triplets, represent a threat not just to one really expensive piece of American spy hardware but to the basic functioning of modern America itself. “Russia is developing on-orbit capabilities that seek to exploit our reliance on space-based systems,” Raymond says.

Whatever the Russian crafts’ -mission—and Moscow says it is purely peaceful—Raymond’s not wrong that Americans have come to rely on satellites in ways they hardly begin to appreciate. Even as the Cosmos 2543 was launching its projectile, Air Force satellites were performing a host of civilian tasks back home in the U.S. Streetlamps timed to global positioning system (GPS) spacecraft were turning on across the country, and businesses were relying on GPS to time-stamp credit-card purchases. Weather satellites were transmitting information for nightly forecasts. Many of the around 650,000 calls made to 911 every day in the U.S. depend on satellites overhead. [Continue reading…]