Two U.S. Air Force satellites designed to spy on satellites of other nations including China are moving into pre-designated orbits to accomplish their mission.

A Delta IV rocket that blasted off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida yesterday successfully orbited two satellites belonging to the once secret "Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program" or GSSAP.

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Once in orbit, the GSSAP satellites will maneuver above and below a 35,970 kilometer high zone, also called the geosynchronous orbit, where most of the world's massive communications satellites and other spacecraft fly.

General William Shelton, head of Air Force Space Command, blithely compared GSSAP to a "neighborhood watch program" that will keep watch other countries' satellites.

"This neighborhood watch twosome ... will be on the lookout for nefarious capability other nations might try to place in that critical orbital regime," according to Gen. Shelton.

He said the satellites will bolster the U.S.' ability to discern when adversaries attempt to avoid detection and to discover capabilities they may have which might be harmful to our critical assets at these higher altitudes.

A further two GSSAP satellites will be launched in 2016.

Its enhanced maneuvering capabilities allow the GSSAP satellite to get the best possible vantage point for collecting images of other satellites.

The imagery capabilities on the new satellites are a big leap forward compared to the ones the U.S. has been using to monitor objects circling the earth, said Gen. Shelton.

He explained that the GSSAP satellites give the U.S. an ability to look at literal images of objects in geosynchronous orbit.

"A picture is worth a thousand inferences because we can see literally what that [foreign] satellite looks like, and you can effectively reverse-engineer and understand what the capabilities are ... to a much greater extent than you can today."

The U.S. military is worried that in a future conflict, China will attempt to shoot down or disable American military satellites critical for intelligence-gathering, targeting and communications.

"There are myriad counter-space threats that we are seeing on the near horizon," Shelton said.

"We're going to have to adjust our spacecraft constellations to survive in a very different environment from what we've had in the past," and we need "much better situational awareness of what's going on; hence GSSAP."

GSSAP is part of the Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) system, a planned constellation of satellites that will improve the ability of the U.S. to detect and track space objects in orbit around the Earth.