Considering that the space based detection plays an important role in the national missile defense,the composition and working mode of the space-based detection system,the infrared and spectral space-based detection methods are summarized. Firstly,the main tasks of the high earth and low earth orbit satellites in the space-based system are introduced,and the exhaust plume is analyzed by infrared and spectral analysis based on the boost stage missile. On this basis,this paper introduces the infrared detection method of maximum median filtering,Top-hat filtering,PM filtering and spectral information divergence angle of the classic,spectral angle matching,two valued spectral encoding and detection(identification) method,through the analysis of the detection results,summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of infrared detection and spectrum detection.