Amateur satellite spotters
February 2006
I Spy
Amateur satellite spotters can track everything government spymasters
blast into orbit. Except the stealth bird codenamed Misty.
By Patrick Radden KeefePage
Sometime around dawn on the first day of the 1991 Gulf War, Ted Molczan
was woken by a mysterious phone call. Molczan had been up until 3:30 am
in his Toronto apartment, riveted by the televised images of Tomahawk
missiles raining down on Baghdad, so he was groggy when the phone rang.
A male voice with a thick accent said: "I know you're involved in
satellite tracking. I'm interested in doing a trade." The caller offered
Molczan information on the orbiting patterns of a constellation of eight
US satellites. In exchange, he wanted to know the orbits for the CIA's
KH-11 "Keyhole" satellites - from space they can discern an object as
small as a softball, and they were sending US forces hi-res digital
imagery of Iraq and Kuwait.
The man made no apology for the early hour and wouldn't say why he
wanted the information. But one thing was clear: He had found the right guy.
Molczan, an energy conservation consultant, was just becoming known for
his skill at a most unusual hobby. In his spare time, he likes to take
binoculars and a stopwatch onto the balcony of his high-rise apartment
and track clandestine US spy satellites. There are thousands of amateur
satellite observers active today, but Molczan is a leader of an informal
group of 20 or so who specialize in so-called black satellites, the
orbits of which are not disclosed, and the existence of which is often
classified. Molczan and his band of associates monitor some 140
classified US satellites, like the Lacrosse radar imaging satellites,
which can see through cloud cover and darkness and produce photo-quality
images of targets on Earth.
The observers, who congregate on a Web site called Heavens-Above and a
mailing list called SeeSat-L, have amassed an impressive collection of
information and expertise. For two decades, they have played a high tech
game of hide-and-seek with the US's National Reconnaissance Office, a
secretive satellite agency. By coordinating their efforts, amateur
observers in Europe, North America, and South Africa monitor satellites
at different phases of their journeys and extrapolate the precise
dimensions of their orbits. Astonishingly, despite the hobbyists' modest
resources - most observe part-time from their balconies and backyards
with equipment available at RadioShack - they are good enough to spot
almost anything the NRO, with its estimated $7 billion budget, blasts
into space. That, of course, is why the mystery caller wanted to chat.
Molczan told the man that he didn't have current information on KH-11s
because most of his fellow satellite spotters were based in the Northern
Hemisphere and Keyholes were "out of season" in winter, obscured by
Earth's shadow. "I asked, 'Well, who are you?'" Molczan remembers. "He
sort of laughed and said, 'Let's just say I'm south of you.'"
The conversation lasted barely three minutes, but Molczan says it still
haunts him. It made him begin to think about what would happen if the
information collected by those "in the hobby" ever ended up in the wrong
hands.
So far that concern hasn't changed the way he works. Fifteen years after
that unsettling experience, Molczan and the network have developed an
almost zoological catalog of the many secret creatures that streak
across the evening sky - and they've posted everything online. But
there's one satellite whose information Molczan says he might not
disclose. As it happens, it's also the one he cannot find.
Since the early '90s, he has been hunting a new, supersecret breed of
satellite that has become a kind of white whale for the observers and a
source of considerable controversy on Capitol Hill. Codenamed Misty,
it's a multibillion-dollar stealth photoreconnaissance device that took
the CIA and the NRO a decade to develop and was designed to be
untrackable by Soviet adversaries. It began orbiting Earth in the spring
of 1990, when it prompted a high-stakes hunt that obsesses the amateurs
to this day.
"It's too overcast to see any satellites tonight," Molczan says. "But
look over there." We're standing on the balcony of the bachelor
apartment he shares with two cats, Josie and Midnight, looking out over
Toronto, 23 stories below. At 52, Molczan is a large man, 6'5'' and
fleshy, with long silver-blond hair and bangs in a sharp fringe over his
brow. Moving with the exaggerated care of a giant afraid he might break
things, he adjusts his Swift 11 x 80 binoculars on their massive tripod
so that he can train them over Lake Ontario, which appears swallowed by
mist.
"See the TV tower?" he asks, and sure enough, as I peer through the
scopes a quartet of white lights blink from the other side of the lake,
where before I had seen nothing. "That's Hamilton, where I was born and
raised. It's about 30 miles from here."
Molczan is a child of the space age. When Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth in
April 1961, Molczan's father cut the Russian cosmonaut's picture out of
the newspaper and gave it to 7-year-old Ted. "I was this totally square
kid," he told me. "The Beatles were around, but they didn't exist for
me. My life was Apollo." He converted his parents' rec room into a
shrine to the space program, with clippings from Life magazine and a
giant map of the moon. Even before Molczan knew the constellations by
name, he knew them by sight, and he discerned in the Rorschach of the
night sky his own menagerie of shapes and creatures. "But the idea that
people were going to go there," he says to me, still a little breathless
at the thought, "that was new. I mean, it was something people had
dreamed about over the centuries, but here I was, a kid, and it was
happening right then."
One evening in the summer of 1968, just after Molczan had flunked his
first year of high school, he was standing in his parents' driveway. He
saw a brilliant satellite low in the western sky, tracing a
north-to-south arc. The object was so vivid that he thought he could
recognize it if it passed by again, and he grew determined to "recover
it" - work out its orbit and predict its return.
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