In what ways has space photography played an important role?

Military space technology has accelerated the process of military modernization. With the development of various military satellites, the capabilities and levels of military reconnaissance, communication, mapping, navigation, positioning, early warning, monitoring and weather forecasting have been improved unprecedentedly, which plays an important role in military command and combat. Military space technology has been applied to space surveillance and space support, and its application in space action and space service support is also under study.

Military spacecraft is the core of military aerospace engineering system. It includes military satellites, manned spacecraft, space shuttles, future military space stations and some space weapons. Their main uses are:

First, space surveillance

It mainly includes remote sensing reconnaissance, electronic reconnaissance, missile early warning, ocean surveillance and nuclear explosion detection.

Second, space support.

Include satellite communication, satellite meteorological observation, satellite navigation, satellite geodesy and satellite mapping.

Third, space operations.

It refers to attacking and destroying enemy spacecraft with various types of anti-satellite weapons, or attacking and destroying enemy land, sea and air targets with directed energy weapons and kinetic energy weapons carried on spacecraft. It also belongs to the category of space operations to capture and destroy enemy military spacecraft directly by using robotic arms, robots or astronauts on manned spacecraft. Space warfare weapon technology is still in the initial stage of research and experiment, and there is still a considerable distance from actual use.