Washington and Beijing have finished setting up a “space hotline” between them to reduce the risk of conflict between the two superpowers. Fears of an orbital arms have been mounting and the space hotline will serve as the ultimate “diplomatic safety valve,” as the Financial Times reported.

This direct link with China is similar to the nuclear “red telephone” the US and Russia had several decades ago. This old US-Russian hotline is still operating today as a legacy of the Cold War with the same function as the new US-China one.

The Verge reported that the hotline is used for information sharing specifically to space and military agencies on “potential collisions, approaches, or tests” in space. Before the hotline, "we had to send notifications to the Chinese via their ministry of foreign affairs. The chain would go from JSpOC [Joint Space Operations Center] to the Pentagon, to the State Department, to the US Embassy in Beijing, and then on to a contact there."

The space hotline is an important development as space-capable nations like the US, Russia, and China have been developing anti-satellite weapons, defenses, or both. There is a legitimate fear that any mishaps and accidents in space can be misinterpreted as an act of war and chaos will descend on earth, Engadget noted.

Frank Rose, US assistant secretary of state, told the Financial Times that, China has been developing “a full spectrum of ant-satellite capabilities. He added that China has done numerous tests and that they view space as an “asymmetric vulnerability of the United States and its allies.” Denial of access to space assets is viewed as a military advantage.

Patricia Lewis, research director at Chatham House, an international affairs think-tank, said that satellite assets are critical not just for military use. They control everything from cars, air traffic control, and even less subtle things like pipelines and farming.