The announcement came three days after Russia backed India's response to a Chinese satellite-destroying weapons test that demanded a "weapons free outer space."

Indian airforce chief Shashi Tyagi said the military was in the process of establishing an aerospace defence command "to exploit outer space," the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency reported.

"As the reach of our airforce is expanding it has become extremely important that we exploit space and for it you need space assets," Tyagi told reporters in the western Indian city of Gandhinagar.

"We are an aerospace power having trans-oceanic reach and we have started training a core group of people for the aerospace command," the air chief marshall said without specifying a time-frame for the ambitious project.

Military sources said the Indian project would try and replicate the North American Aerospace Defence Command set up by the United States and Canada which detects and tracks threatening man-made objects in outer space.

The Indian command's charter will also include ensuring air sovereignty and air defence, they said.

"The aerospace command will be an integration of various components of the airforce, Indian satellites, radars, communications systems, fighter aircraft and helicopters," PTI quoted an unnamed airforce official as saying.

The Indian airforce, the world's fourth largest with around 800 combat jets and some 400 support aircraft, plans to establish air superiority in Asia with the acquisition of 126 latest war jets at a cost of some seven billion dollars.

The Indian airforce has developed air-launched cruise missile systems. It also has a key role in the deployment of India's nuclear weapons arsenal.

China, which fought a bitter border war with India in 1962, destroyed an orbiting satellite this month using a ballistic missile -- making it the third country after Russia and the US with such capabilities.

The successful splashdown of an Indian capsule last week into the Indian Ocean signalled the country's growing reach into outer space and its obsession for military spin-offs from such projects.

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