Like the well-known „red telephone,“ set up between Moscow and Washington in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the idea is to keep a misunderstanding or other miscommunication from escalating to a dangerous situation in space and here on Earth.

According to a US assistant secretary of state, 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.“

A similar, dedicated space hotline has existed between Russia and the US since the Cold War, but such a system is just now being set up with China, a growing power in space.