Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who
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Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who
#2[flagged]
Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who
#3TLDR:
While the title says that it is not known who has moved an abandoned UK satellite used for military telecommunications, the article very strongly implies that it was someone from USA, who does not want to acknowledge this.
The satellite had been built by USA and initially operated also by USA, before being handed down to the UK, so they had the capabilities to control it at any time.
Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who
#4If satellite warfare will be like chess, this could be a preparatory move.
Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who
#5This didn't happen recently. From the article:
>Almost certainly, it was commanded to fire its thrusters in the mid-1970s to take it westwards.
Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who
#6TLDR: While the title says that it is not known who has moved an abandoned UK satellite used for military telecommunications, the article very strongly implies that it was someone from USA, who does not want to acknowledge this. The satellite had been built by USA and initially operated also by USA, before being handed down to the UK, so they had the capabilities to control it at any time.
UKs nuclear deterrence is built by the USA.
It is a testament to deGaulle's genius that he never fell into that trap.
Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who
#7[deleted]
Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who
#8- "We need to avoid what I call super-spreader events. When these things explode or something collides with them, it generates thousands of pieces of debris that then become a hazard to something else that we care about."
There was one of these just a couple weeks ago (and that was not the first),
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41904346 ("Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit")
Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who
#9There was remarkably little in the way of security for early satellites (or space probes).
I recently encountered here on HN the suggestion that, the main reason you can't find particularly in-depth details on the Voyager space probes, is project security. Security through obscurity, mostly. If amateurs can detect the signal from the Voyager probes with a small dish antenna, it's at least conceivable someone might hook up a really powerful transmitter, aim it in the probe's direction, and start issuing commands. There's no cryptography, of course. The resources required to hijack like that in the 1970s would have been much greater, and I doubt being hacked was much on the designer's minds.
The Apollo Program was the same; today anyone with the documentation, a small dish antenna, a software radio, and some nerd dedication, would be able to hack Apollo midflight via its radio link. It was the equivalent of a root prompt with no password on an exposed port.
A bit closer to home, there's a tremendous amount of semi-functional orbital junk with a similar lack of security, decades-old computers still waiting for telecommands.
Re: Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who
#10If satellite warfare will be like chess, this could be a preparatory move.
Man, whoever did it back in the 70s must have been really forward thinking.