From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is The Story.
I'm Rosie Wright.
January 2022, Western space chiefs were watching as something unusual was playing out thousands of miles above them.
There was a Chinese satellite and it managed to grab a defunct satellite.
This was called a dead satellite.
It dragged it hundreds of miles away and threw it into what's called the graveyard orbit.
And this means that that satellite will now just drift forever.
Larissa Brown is Defence Editor for The Times.
And at the time, you know, people thought, oh, it's, you know,
the Chinese basically, you know, picking up litter in space.
It's nothing more concerning than that.
But actually I was having a chat with someone just this week and it was a big moment
for space chiefs in the West because what they actually saw was a dress rehearsal for something very concerning.
They thought that China was essentially practicing ripping satellites out of orbit.
And if they were able to do that, then this would mean that they could cripple a nation's economy.
On that day, the West and its space leaders woke up to the fact that China had demonstrated
they have the ability to cause real damage from space.
This is the latest version of the space race.
Not who will next put man on the moon, but who can put weapons into orbit.
And this week, the US may have pulled ahead.