On 27 March 2019 India destroyed one of its own satellites in orbit with a ground-launched missile, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the feat to the nation in a televised address. The operation was codenamed Mission Shakti. The target was Microsat-R, an Indian satellite orbiting at an altitude of around 282 kilometres, and the interceptor was a direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon developed from India's ballistic-missile-defence work. With the successful hit, India became the fourth country to demonstrate a kinetic anti-satellite capability publicly, joining the United States, Russia and China. For New Delhi the demonstration was as much political as technical. It was a statement that India could reach and destroy an object in orbit, and that its space assets were therefore not to be taken for granted by any rival.
The strategic backdrop matters. India had spent decades building space capability against foreign resistance, from the cryogenic-engine sanctions of the early 1990s to the GPS denial it experienced during the 1999 Kargil conflict. It had watched China conduct a far larger anti-satellite test in 2007. By 2019, with a growing constellation of Indian satellites supporting communications, navigation through NavIC, and reconnaissance, India's planners had concrete national assets in orbit worth deterring an adversary from attacking. Mission Shakti was framed at home as insurance, a way of signalling that India possessed the means to threaten a hostile satellite in return, and thus could not be coerced in space without cost.
The international reaction focused on debris. NASA's administrator publicly called the test a terrible thing, and the agency's concern was specific and technical rather than merely rhetorical. Even a low-altitude intercept flings fragments in many directions, and some of those fragments are pushed into higher, longer-lived orbits by the energy of the collision. NASA assessed that a number of fragments from Microsat-R had been lofted above the altitude of the International Space Station, temporarily raising the collision risk to the crewed station. Debris created at low altitude does decay comparatively quickly as atmospheric drag pulls it down, so India's choice of a low target genuinely limited the persistence of the hazard. But limited is not the same as none, and the episode illustrated that there is no such thing as a clean kinetic anti-satellite test.
India was careful to present Mission Shakti as a responsible demonstration. The low altitude of the intercept was emphasised precisely because it meant most debris would re-enter and burn up within weeks or months rather than lingering for years or decades. This was an implicit contrast with the 2007 Chinese test, which was conducted at a much higher altitude and produced a vast, long-lasting debris cloud that continues to threaten spacecraft. India's message was that it had joined the anti-satellite club while trying to be a conscientious member of it. Critics noted that a responsible anti-satellite test is still an anti-satellite test, and that every new demonstrator normalises the behaviour and adds, however briefly, to the debris burden in a shared environment.
Underneath the debris debate sat the real point of the exercise, which was identical to the point of every anti-satellite demonstration before it. A state was telling potential adversaries not to assume its orbital infrastructure was undefended, and not to assume they could operate freely in space during a conflict. Deterrence in orbit works, if it works at all, by making clear that an attack on your satellites can be answered in kind. Mission Shakti was India's entry into that logic. The demonstration was also aimed at a domestic audience and at India's standing among spacefaring powers, arriving as it did in a country proud of a space programme built largely on its own resources and often in the teeth of foreign restrictions. Showing that India could reach orbit with a weapon was, in that sense, of a piece with showing that it could reach the Moon or Mars with a probe. Each was a statement that India would not be a junior partner in space.
For a country that had so often been on the receiving end of others' control over space, the test carried a particular meaning about self-reliance. India could not guarantee that its satellites would never be threatened, but it could ensure that any adversary contemplating such a threat knew India could retaliate against theirs. That is a narrow and hard-edged form of sovereignty. It does not protect the orbital commons, and it does not make anyone's satellites safer in absolute terms. What it does is remove the option of one-sided coercion. India decided that dependence on space had become important enough to its security that it needed its own hand on a weapon capable of reaching orbit, rather than trusting that no one would ever aim one at Indian assets.