Nov 16th 2021ON NOVEMBER 15th, at around seven in the morning Greenwich Mean Time, the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) was warned that there was some debris coming their way and that they ought to get into the two spacecraft that are currently moored there. That way, if anything went wrong, the four Americans, one Russian and one German currently crewing the ISS under the command of another Russian, Colonel Anton Shkaplerov, could make a quick getaway.The source of this new debris was, at the time, unspecified. Now it is known to have been the remains of a Soviet-era spy satellite (known as Kosmos-1408) which had been used as the target in a test of a Russian anti-satellite weapon (ASAT).According to America’s State Department this “reckless” act turned the two-tonne space hulk, which was orbiting at an altitude of about 500km, into more than 1,500 pieces of orbital debris trackable by radar (which may be down to a few centimetres in diameter) as well as many more smaller fragments. The cloud of shrapnel will, over time, spread out around the Earth. It will take a while for the orbits of all the hypersonic flotsam to be determined accurately enough to allow the ISS, China’s space station Tiangong, or anything else in low-Earth orbit to take evasive action.There is no doubt that America is telling the truth. LeoLabs, a Silicon Valley startup which tracks satellites and space debris, confirmed that the satellite had been broken up. Russia had filed a warning that there would be a rocket launch from Plesetsk early that morning, and an anti-satellite weapon called Nudol has previously been tested from the same place (though not against a real target). Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard who keeps a database of satellites, tweeted a diagram showing that the time announced for the launch corresponded to a time when Kosmos-1408 would be in range of the missile.Russia did not immediately confirm its responsibility. But its ASAT shot can be seen as fitting into a pattern of provocative actions over past weeks, most seriously a large build-up of troops on the Ukrainian border.Experts condemned the action for further increasing the risks which space debris poses to the fast-growing number of satellites in vulnerable low-Earth orbits. The only event to have created more such fragments this century was a Chinese ASAT test carried out in 2007; it was responsible for about 3,000 of the 10,000 pieces of debris that America keeps an eye on for threats to the ISS. “That’s been our nemesis for an extended period of time,” Bill Gerstenmaier, once the head of NASA’s human spaceflight programme and now an executive at SpaceX, which ferries astronauts to the ISS, said at an industry event in Las Vegas. “It looks like now we have another one of these. This is not what we need to do.” America’s Space Command said the debris would pose a “significant risk” to the ISS, other human space missions and satellites for years, if not decades.An Indian ASAT test in 2019 created considerably less debris, much of it too low to be a threat, but sparked further condemnation and renewed calls for such tests to be outlawed. Indeed, it is arguable that they already are: the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 requires countries to consult with each other before doing anything which might lead to “potentially harmful interference” with the activities of other countries. The space liability convention of 1972 could also apply to damage caused by the debris. But negotiations for a specific ban have yet to gain traction.Even if it does not lead to a ban, though, this provocation will surely have international fallout. America, Canada, the European Space Agency and Japan—Russia’s partners in the ISS—cannot fail to respond. Meanwhile, on the station itself, the direct risks are not, for the moment, reckoned to be as bad as initially feared. Although some of the station remains sealed off, the astronauts and cosmonauts are back at work. What they all feel about the actions of their commander’s motherland has not yet been revealed.