US Vice President Kamala Harris has announced that the country will no longer test anti-satellite weapons. He urged other countries to make the same commitment and establish this policy as a new “norm of responsible behavior in space”.

This practice involves launching rockets from the ground to destroy orbiting satellites. Harris’ statement comes five months after Russia tested the anti-satellite system in November. According to The Verge, the country launched one of the “Nudol” rockets that destroyed the Russian satellite “Cosmos-1408”. The events created a huge cloud of more than 1,500 tracked pieces of garbage, as well as thousands of small pieces that could not be tracked.

The United States, NATO and the European Union condemned the ordeal. It is worth noting that so far no country has used anti-satellite weapons to neutralize another country’s spacecraft.