Yinpiao Zhou Charged with Drone Flying over Vandenberg

But this arrest makes him a perfect candidate for this spying mission, so he could be dismissed as a space/drone nerd.

And then one would have to ask whether the arrest in Shanghai is real or a made-up story. Or an event they orchestrated, so if some foreign intelligence agency quietly checks, they'll find eyewitnesses and people who can confirm the event, not knowing it was made up to give this man a cover story...

I sound like a conspiracy nutter now, but a conspiracy nutter is convinced his idea is definitely what happened, I'm just throwing an idea.

Are you sure?

The Pentagon doesn’t like much of anything to be known about its satellites. The Vera Rubin Observatory will likely make awkward eye contact with some of them. Many of them are telescopes in their own right, but instead of tilting up toward the sky, they point down at Earth. … Each time the telescope were to take one of its 30-second tile images of the sky, the file would be immediately encrypted, without anyone looking at it first, and then sent on to a secure facility in California. … Three days and eight hours later, the entire tile image would be released to astronomers, untouched by black marker or any other technology of redaction. By then, the spy satellites would likely have gone somewhere else. They are elusive, after all. Their orbits are irregular, and they shift direction often. Not even the world’s most accomplished astronomers would be able to infer their present locations from a line of light streaking through a three-day-old image.

When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rub...

Also, 'they' let the drone operates for an hour despite been flagged?? What about data sent real-time. Shouldn't the drone been 'cancelled' as soon ad spotted?