Pakistan gets and gives

Lagging well behind India in its civilian space programme, Pakistan is turning to its all-weather friend, China. During the little noticed visit of Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to China earlier this month, Beijing promised to help Pakistan build and launch satellites for remote sensing and communication.

The Indian security establishment will be eager to know the technical specifications of the remote sensing satellite China is offering Pakistan. Put simply, would it be capable of picking up sensitive military information on India from the skies?

New Delhi would also be keen to figure out what Pakistan is giving in return for China’s gift of a spy satellite. There are unconfirmed reports that Pakistan is already hosting a Chinese space communication facility at Karachi.

Soaring into space does not necessarily liberate you from terra firma. The bigger your space programme, the greater the need for tracking stations around the world.

Great powers manage their space assets with specially designed telemetry ships operating at strategic locations around the globe. China has four of these ships, but their activity needs to be supplemented by land-based stations. The Karachi tracking station is apparently among the three such foreign facilities currently operated by China.

Elint constellation

Western analysts say a major weakness of Chinese space programme is its lack of satellites dedicated to gathering electronic intelligence. Elint offers significant information on the communication traffic and radar signatures of other military forces, and boosts signal intelligence (Sigint) acquired from land-based facilities.

... contd.