by Duncan Lunan

When I discussed Ian Rankin’s 1990 novel Westwind  (‘When Shuttles Crash’, ON 17^th March 2024), I was mainly pointing out that he had evidently gone to considerable trouble to get the facts of a Shuttle crash exactly right, and then not shared most of them with the reader, although they were actually needed to understand the beginning of the plot.  The one thing that really wasn’t right was that a Shuttle could be sabotaged and crash without attracting any attention, by contrast with the days of national mourning, the intensive investigations and the huge public involvement which followed the losses of the Challenger and Columbia.  Nobody except the bad guys comes near the sole British survivor in hospital, and their only concern is how much he remembers.  

The facts not stated are that the Briton is on the Shuttle as a Payload Specialist, an engineer responsible for the release of a British satellite in orbit.  That gets him a seat on the flight deck behind one of the pilots during the descent, which enables him to see what happens during the final pile-up.  The problem is that during the earlier release of the satellite he noticed something wrong with its telemetry, which proves to be symptomatic of a much bigger plot  (see below).

Britain’s military commitment in space has less to do with optical spying, for which we rely mainly on our allies, but rather with communications and with electronic surveillance.  The programme is called Skynet and has no connection with the sentient computer of the later Terminator movies, but a parallel between them and Westwind has now come to light and it does exist through the real-life Skynet programme.

Skynet 1-A  (Fig. 1)  was built for the UK by the US Philco Ford aerospace corporation  (now defunct)  and it was launched for us on a US Delta-II booster  (also now discontinued)  on 21^st November, 1969  (Fig. 2).  It was placed in geosynchronous orbit 22,000 miles over East Africa  (Fig. 3), from where it could provide communications to British forces as far round the world as Singapore.  (Think of the near-horizontal angle of most commercial satellite dishes, which are tracking geosynchronous satellites exchanging messages and broadcasts with the Far East.)  

As Arthur C. Clarke pointed out in his classic paper ‘Extraterrestrial Relays’, Wireless World, 1945, a satellite in geosynchronous orbit commands up to a third of the globe.  There’s a widespread misconception that synchronous orbit can be achieved at any location and at any height;  this mistake was extensively perpetrated in the original Star Trek, where the Enterprise does it over a wide range of latitudes, and even over the pole of a planet in one episode.  Sydney Jordan used artistic license to do the same in his Lance McLane strip for the Daily Record, in which the starship Hope appears in synchronous orbit over locations including Belgium, Nepal, Florida, Cyprus, New Mexico and Easter Island, as well as much too low over the Moon and Mars.  Stationary orbit, where the orbital velocity of the ship exactly matches the rotation of the planet below, is only possible over the equator  (Fig. 4).  Over the Earth, the only altitude at which a satellite is synchronised with the 24-hour rotation of the planet is at a height of 22,000 miles.

In real life a truly stationary position could only be achieved with a great deal of ‘station-keeping’ effort.  The Earth is not a perfect sphere, and with the additional pulls of the Sun and the Moon on the satellite, it naturally adopts a ‘Figure-of-eight orbit’ with the centre of its ground track at the geostationary point.  Although Fig. 3 appeared several times in the media last week, its red lozenge shows Skynet-1A well south of Lake Victoria, in grey on the equator above it, and presumably shows the satellite at its southerly limit.  Or the original diagram may have been deliberately misleading:  military intelligence sometimes goes too far with that, like the time during World War 2 when the Royal Observatory was told to classify the phases of the Moon ‘in case the enemy got hold of it’.

Skynet 1-A was planned for a one-year life, and 18 months after launch its amplifiers failed, although ground control remained in touch with it  (see below).  Skynet 1-B was launched on another Delta II-M on 19^th August 1970, but was written off after the apogee ‘kick stage’ failed to place it in geosynchronous orbit.  Nevertheless Skynet 1-A had proved its worth and the Skynet-2 which followed  (Fig. 5)  was intended for a 20-year lifetime.  Skynet 2-A was stranded in low orbit and deorbited, but Skynet 2-B reached ‘geosynch’ successfully and was positioned over Kenya in 1974.  Both were built by Marconi at Portsmouth but were still launched from the USA  (Fig. 6)  because the UK had finally given up on having its own launchers by that time.  Skynet-3 was discontinued after the UK contracted its responsibilities ‘East of Suez’.  Skynet-4  (Fig. 7)  was intended for launch by the Space Shuttle, with RAF officers as Payload Specialists  (as in Westwind), but the design was modified for expendable boosters after the loss of the Challenger in 1986  (Fig. 8). 

Five were built and launched successfully in 1990 to 2001  (Fig. 9), and Skynet 4-C was moved into a 10-degree inclination orbit and still maintains communications with the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station for six hours per day.  Four Skynet-5s have been launched, most recently Skynet 5-D in 2012, and Skynet 6 is planned for 2025  (Fig. 10).

The images above show that the evolution of Skynet satellites has closely paralleled that of commercial communications satellites, though lagging some way behind.  The basic architecture of Skynet 4 is very similar to the European ECS comsats, particularly its MARECS variant for marine communications  (Fig. 11), the first of which was launched in December 1981.  A MARECS-A portable terminal was under test in the Falkland Islands by the Royal Marines at the time of the 1982 invasion, and it was rumoured that a Commando had escaped with it into ‘Camp’, the countryside outside the only town, and was keeping British Intelligence apprised of Argentine activity.  It may have been only propaganda, but it may also have kept the enemy busy looking for him while the Task Force made its way down.

What extra facilities have been added to Skynets during their evolution is much harder to say, though it’s a good guess that they’ve been used for electronic surveillance as well as communications, but very little is known to the British public, however well known it is to the Russians, for instance.  Keeping such things secret is sometimes a way of testing the effectiveness of British security, to reassure our allies.  (See ‘Visitor at Uist’, ON, July 10^th, 2022.)  At the ‘Earth Mission 2000’ conference in London, which I covered for the Herald and for Asgard, Space Policy and others, Yakk Lokk, Director of the Estonian Space Agency, argued that much of the secrecy surrounding satellite technology was unnecessary.  If you want to know the resolving power of a given satellite’s cameras, you can either spend 30 years introducing a sleeper agent into that nation’s security agency, working his way up to the necessary level of clearance, or you can give its dimensions to a second-year physics student, who will have the answer for you in an hour.  After all, its lens or mirror cannot be larger in diameter than the shroud of the launch vehicle.  Telling the capabilities of its electronic systems from artists’ impressions is not so easy, but a lot can be worked out from its orbital characteristics – see below. 

In January 1987 the Special Branch raided BBC Scotland to prevent the broadcasting of a programme by Duncan Campbell called ‘Secret Society’, which was to include details of a secret spy satellite codenamed ‘Zircon’, to be launched under cover of commercial comsat launches and – it was thought at the time – the coming generation of Skynet 4s.  Zircon crystals are among the oldest materials on Earth, dating back to 4.2 billion years.  It wasn’t likely that the codename would give away the technology to be used, but I was asked at the time by an executive member of the STUC what uses might be made of blue-green lasers.  I got a reaction when I replied, ‘They’re best for underwater communications’, but he then changed the subject and I think he was just confirming what he’d heard elsewhere.  In a subsequent article for New Statesman  (‘Spy in the Sky’, 22^nd December 1989), Duncan Campbell stated that Zircon had been cancelled and replaced by a US satellite, launched by a Titan 34D on 4^th September 1989.  (‘Zircon Affair’, Wikipedia, accessed 15^th November 2024.)  That would have been a much larger payload than Skynet, unless it was a multiple satellite launch, and 4^th September 1989 wasn’t a Skynet launch date.  Whether any Skynet did attempt underwater communication with blue-green lasers, it may be a long time before we find out, but from the properties and uses I have checked on, they wouldn’t have used zircons.  But now we have a new story which brings all this back to mind, as well as having parallels with Westwind and the Terminator franchise, as above.

In the later Terminator films, ‘Skynet’ is the super-computer which goes rogue and triggers World War 3 in an attempt to wipe out the human race.  In Westwind, the communications satellite being launched by the Space Shuttle is to jam and replace a British spy satellite’s coverage of part of the UK, where a cadre of rogue British and US military officers are preparing to launch a missile. Their plan is to trigger World War 3 and emerge afterwards from their fall-out shelters  (aka ‘Regional Seats of Government’, back in the 1960s).  The plot is foiled because the fake coverage doesn’t change with the seasons;  in that respect the novel resembles the late Archie Roy’s thriller The Curtained Sleep, in which a Soviet plan to seize RAF Macrihanish on the Kintyre Peninsula fails because a character who’s been drugged for months realises that the stars are wrong for the season it’s supposed to be.

What has happened now is that a British satellite which probably had some intelligence functions has indeed been nobbled, apparently by US military back in the 1970s.  As mentioned above, because Skynet-1A was US-built and launched, it was commissioned on orbit by US personnel before being turned over to British control.  At the end of its operational life, in June 1987 it was turned back to US control, and it was supposed to be moved to a ‘satellite graveyard’ over the Indian Ocean  (Fig. 12), in a higher orbit to reduce the chance of colliding with others and adding to the space debris problem.  Instead, a search for space debris has now found it at another ‘gravitational low’ over the Pacific  (Figs. 3 & 12), thousands of miles from where it should be  (Jonathan Amos, ‘Somebody moved UK’s oldest satellite, and no-one knows who or why’, BBC News, Science and Environment, 9^th November 2024).

Skynet 1-A was managed by teams at RAF Oakhanger in Hampshire  (Fig. 13), but at the beginning and end of the mission, it was controlled by USAF personnel at the Sunnyvale USAF Station in California, within a satellite facility colloquially known as the Blue Cube  (Fig. 14), later named Onizuka Air Force Station after one of the Challenger astronauts, and now a Heritage Park Museum.  When Oakhanger’s control was down for essential maintenance, a Skynet team from Oakhanger would go to the USAF facility and operate Skynet during ‘Oakout’.  Logs of those operations are incomplete, and it’s being suggested that the Skynet might have been moved during one of those gaps, but it doesn’t explain why and takes no account of orbital dynamics.

To move a spacecraft from one point to another in the same orbit, you don’t just point at it and fire thrusters, as Sandra Bullock does in Gravity.  (As the late John Brunner said of such mistakes in The Shockwave Rider, “See you later, accelerator.  Much later.”)  What you have to do is raise your spacecraft into a higher orbit and circularise it, at which point it will be moving slower than the Earth rotating below and drift westward, till you reverse the manoeuvre and drop down to your target, followed by another re-circularisation.  Or you could drop into a lower orbit and drift round eastward, as Skynet 1-A was supposed to do.  Either way, it all requires detailed tracking and very careful timing, probably requiring multiple thruster burns rather than the simplified procedure I’ve detailed.  Anyway, it can’t have been done during any of the ‘Oakouts’ because not only would the British team notice it had moved, but Whitehall would very quickly have noticed that their communications with the Far East had dropped out.  After the USAF took over in June 1987, the easiest way to avoid detection would have been to start the graveyard manoeuvre, fail to complete it and go round the long way to the intended destination, over or near Central America, probably taking several months.  When the clandestine use of Skynet ended, if ‘abandoned in place’ it would have drifted west to its current position, where its figure-of-eight orbit creates a significant hazard to other satellites currently in use.  Because the satellite was nominally British, under the existing United Nations space treaties the UK might be required to remove it, and right now there is no technology with which to do that.

Coverage which I have seen has been surprisingly naive about why this might have been done.  Although the Skynet’s amplifiers had failed, it was still in contact with its controllers and might well have been able to pick up and send to radios on the ground directly below.  And a very quick look at the map shows where US special forces might well have been engaged in clandestine, illegal activity.  To quote Wikipedia  (accessed 15^th November 2024):

The Contras (from Spanish: la contrarrevolución, lit. ’the counter-revolution‘) were the various right-wing rebel groups that were active from 1979 to 1990 in opposition to the Marxist Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction Government in Nicaragua, which had come to power in 1979 following the Nicaraguan Revolution… From an early stage, the rebels received financial and military support from the United States government, and their military significance decisively depended on it. After U.S. support was banned by Congress, the Reagan administration covertly continued it. These illegal activities culminated in the Iran–Contra affair.

The BBC article and others urge us not to engage in speculation about who might be responsible for moving the satellite.  To quote the 12^th century William of Newburgh  (‘The Green Children of Woolpit’, ON, June 19^th, 2022), ‘Let each man say of this what he will, and account for these things as best he can’.  I’ll leave it there.

Duncan Lunan’s recent books are available from the publishers and through Amazon.  For details see Duncan’s website, http://www.duncanlunan.com.