Chinese missile test prompts concerns
China opened the year with a very big bang on January 11, when they fired a ballistic missile that blasted one of their old weather satellites out of orbit more than 800 kilometers above the Earth. The Chinese satellite was about the same distance from Earth as U.S. spy satellites. The U.S. has been able to knock out satellites with missiles since the mid-1980s. The only U.S. test was conducted on Oct. 13, 1985. Later that year, the U.S. government implemented a ban on testing anti-satellite weapons.