With Australians still adjusting to the new AUKUS military agreement, the United States has been quietly expanding and refocusing its satellite surveillance base at Pine Gap, preparing to attack China with nuclear weapons.
By Peter Cronau
The rapid expansion of the Pine Gap satellite surveillance base near Alice Springs, Australia from 35 to 45 satellite dishes, is designed to give the U.S. the edge in a potential nuclear war with China.
Where desert oaks and spinifex tufts once baked in the Central Australian sun, three new white domes have mushroomed in a 14-hectare clearing along the western edge of the U.S.’s ‘most important surveillance base’ in the world.
Under huge plastic radomes, three of Pine Gap’s new satellite dishes have been built to receive information from a new generation of U.S. spy satellites that bring a heightened level of surveillance of China’s nuclear missile launch sites at a time of increasing confrontation between China and the U.S. and its allies.
Thermal imaging satellites presently used by the Pine Gap base are able to detect rocket and missile launches in the battlefields of Gaza and Ukraine, as I have earlier reported, but the greatest interest of the new satellite dishes at the base are missile launches from China.
A new generation of ‘eyes-in-the-sky,’ known as Overhead Persistent InfraRed (OPIR) satellites, will soon be launched by the U.S. military to augment the existing satellites of the Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS). These satellites are designed to detect the thermal signatures of rocket and missile launches, using immensely sensitive infrared sensors.
The Rush to Catch Up
The U.S. Defense Department’s ‘Space Force’ is poised to launch five new ballistic missile early warning infrared sensor tracking satellites. The first
launch had been planned for 2025, but technical difficulties have seen it delayed until 2026. Three of the five new OPIR satellites will go into geostationary orbit at 35,000 kilometers altitude over the equator and two will orbit the poles.
The new Pine Gap dishes will use these OPIR satellites acting as ‘spotters’ to better detect heat signatures from ballistic missiles at the earliest stages of launch, to then send this data to low orbit tracking satellites, which aim to guide the targeting of the launch locations and of the incoming missiles.
They will aim to defeat the latest hi-tech maneuverable ballistic and hypersonic missiles which have been developed by China and Russia. As Declassified Australia reported in depth in 2022, the U.S. has no present infallible defense against hypersonic missiles, which can reach speeds of 12,500 kilometers per hour and carry either conventional or nuclear warheads.
Lacking any defense against the new missiles, developing new surveillance satellites therefore became urgent.
It became evident to U.S. military planners that the older SBIRS satellites were not up to dealing with the advanced hypersonic missiles — developing new surveillance satellites therefore became urgent.
As the new satellites were being developed to face the new hypersonic threat, new satellite dishes and electronics on the ground were also needed. That’s why they need to upgrade Pine Gap.
— Nexusnewsfeed, June 15 – 21, 2024
— Peter Cronau is an award-winning investigative journalist, writer, and film-maker. His documentaries have appeared on ABC’s Four Corners and Radio National’s Background Briefing. He is an editor and cofounder of Declassified Australia.
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