Outer space

How America's Spooks Seek to Spy on Distant Satellites

On August 30, 2017, a video appeared online showing footage of every satellite operator’s worst nightmare: an anomaly. It’s the word space types use when they mean a bad thing, especially one they perhaps don’t understand and may want to downplay.

In the video, an orb—a satellite known as Telkom-1—hovers in the center of the frame while stars streak across the screen in the background. It glows quietly as the seconds tick by. Then, seemingly without warning, the satellite spews a cloud of debris. It flares, and then a slower plume of pieces detaches and floats lazily away.

“When that point of light starts shedding things to the left, right, bottom, it’s clear it had an event,” says Gerard van Belle, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, using another favorite aerospace euphemism. “There’s a lot of questions.”