Military satellite
artificial satellite used for military purpose
A military satellite is an artificial satellite used for a military purpose. The most common missions are intelligence gathering, navigation and military communications.
The first military satellites were photographic reconnaissance missions. Some attempts were made to develop satellite based weapons but this work was halted in 1967 following the ratification of international treaties banning the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in orbit.
As of 2013, there are 950 satellites of all types in Earth orbit. It is not possible to identify the exact number of these that are military satellites partly due to secrecy and partly due to dual purpose missions such as GPS satellites that serve both civilian and military purposes. As of December 2018 there are 320 known military or dual-use satellites in the sky, half of which are owned by the US, followed by Russia, China and India.
Military reconnaissance satellites
The first military use of satellites was for reconnaissance.
In the United States the first formal military satellite programs, Weapon System 117L, was developed in the mid-1950s. Within this program a number of sub-programs were developed including Corona.
The public source identifies “Military satellite” as artificial satellite used for military purpose. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Military, satellite and artificial.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q973887. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1967, 2013 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Military satellite” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.