China ASAT Test (Fengyun-1C)

On 11 January 2007, China launched an SC-19 direct-ascent missile from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre and drove its kinetic kill vehicle head-on into the defunct Fengyun-1C weather satellite at roughly 865 km altitude, in a near-polar sun-synchronous orbit. The two bodies met at a closing speed of about 8 km/s — fast enough that no explosive was needed. The satellite was simply pulverised into a cloud of hypervelocity shrapnel. It remains the single largest debris-generating event in the history of spaceflight.

The impact produced more than 3,000 trackable fragments — pieces large enough for the U.S. Space Surveillance Network to catalogue individually, with the count rising past 3,400 over the following years — and NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office estimates roughly 35,000 pieces larger than one centimetre in all. In a single stroke the test increased the catalogued low-Earth-orbit debris population by roughly 25 percent. Crucially, the collision happened in a high, slow-decaying shell, so most of the cloud has stayed aloft: on the order of 2,800 fragments were still catalogued in the mid-2020s, and a large share are expected to persist for decades to centuries. The debris now threads through some of the most heavily used orbits. In early 2013 the Russian laser-ranging satellite BLITS was knocked out of its spin — its rotation period changing abruptly — by a suspected Fengyun-1C fragment, and the International Space Station has repeatedly manoeuvred, and seen fragments pass within a few kilometres, from the cloud.

The test drew immediate international condemnation and became the defining case study for why destructive anti-satellite demonstrations are so damaging: a few seconds of impact seeds a hazard that outlives the political moment by generations. In its aftermath, China is reported to have shifted toward debris-free ASAT approaches, and the event is routinely cited alongside the 2009 Iridium–Cosmos collision as evidence of how quickly a single act can push a busy orbital regime toward Kessler-syndrome conditions. It remains a permanent fixture in conjunction-screening catalogues and a benchmark against which every later breakup is measured.