MOSCOW, November 18. /TASS/. The microwave weapon developed by Chinese scientists can destroy low-orbit satellites, Alexander Stepanov, military expert, program director of the Academy of Political Scientists and senior researcher of the Institute of Latin America within the Russian Academy of Sciences, told TASS on Monday.
The South China Morning Post reported earlier that Chinese scientists had developed a weapon emitting microwaves that could merge into a powerful energy beam to attack one target.
"This is similar to the Death Star seen in the Star Wars films," the paper said.
A fictional combat space station needed to converge eight laser rays into a single beam for destroying planets, it said.
"Engineers from China have somehow surmounted obstacles and built a system consisting of seven emitting devices and their experimental firings have confirmed that it can effectively suppress signals of the US GPS and other satellites. Now combat ‘Chinese microwave devices’ will be capable of scorching Elon Musk’s Starshield satellite cluster, for example," he said.
The innovation "is a new type of a microwave and, primarily, an anti-satellite weapon that converges and focuses electromagnetic waves on one point to strike targets," he explained.
"Although world leaders of the military-industrial complex have resolved similar tasks for laser systems, this has proven to be harder for microwave emission," the expert pointed out.
In the future, this innovation "can be also used for peaceful purposes, for example, for effective wireless solar energy transmission from the orbit to Earth," he explained.
"This will help create a distributed network of low-orbit solar stations," Stepanov said.