The UK's Oldest Military Spacecraft Moved From Its Intended Orbit - Here's Why That's Troubling

The first artificial satellite put into orbit was Sputnik I. It was launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, more than 10 years before the U.S. put a man on the moon. It was only about the size of a basketball and weighed just under 200 pounds. Today, there are more than 10,000 active satellites in orbit around Earth, along with about 3,000 more dead ones — also known as space junk.

The United Kingdom launched its first satellite in 1969. Called Skynet-1A (no, not from The Terminator movies), it was used to help the British military communicate with troops on the ground in Africa. It stopped working after only a few years and, like all the other defunct satellites, remains in orbit high above us. Scientists had an idea of where it should be today based on gravity — somewhere over the Indian Ocean. Instead, it appears someone moved the satellite into its current position more than 22,000 miles away, over the Americas. And no one knows when it was moved, or why.

If the satellite isn't where it should be and the U.K. didn't move it, then who did? It definitely wasn't the work of extraterrestrial visitors, though there are plenty of other unexplained phenomena out there. Instead, it was likely, well, us. Skynet-1A was built in the U.S. by a company called Philco-Ford, which also worked on projects for NASA. While the United Kingdom is now capable of launching its own rockets, it wasn't in the 1960s, so the Skynet satellite was launched by the U.S. Air Force on a Delta rocket. Because the United States both built and launched the project for the U.K., it had initial control of the satellite once it reached orbit, before handing it off to the Royal Air Force, which operated it from RAF Oakhanger in Hampshire, England.

The United States' involvement in Skynet didn't end there. When Oakhanger was down for maintenance, a team from the RAF base would travel to an Air Force base to operate the satellite. The logs for the satellite are incomplete but indicate that the U.S. was responsible for the satellite's last commands in 1977. Today, when a satellite stops working, if it doesn't burn up in the atmosphere, it is put into what's called an orbital graveyard, well above any satellites that are still operational. This wasn't a standard practice in the 1970s, so Skynet-1A was ultimately left in a lower orbit. If other satellites get too close to Skynet, they're warned, but eventually the satellite may need to be moved.