Off-Nominal - 210 - Hufflepuff Ships (with Greg Gillinger)

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Jake and Anthony are joined by Greg Gillinger of Integrity ISR to talk about what Russia and China are up to lately with their space assets.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 210 - Hufflepuff Ships (with Greg Gillinger) - YouTubeIntegrity ISR: Forged by Service. Proven in Action.Integrity Flash Newsletter | ISR UniversityHome - ISR UniversityThe Space Review: Developing and testing China’s Guowang constellationChina’s Shijian-21 towed dead satellite to a high graveyard orbit - SpaceNewsChinese spacecraft prepare for orbital refueling test as US surveillance sats lurk nearby - SpaceNewsCOMSPOC_OPS on X: “Recent observations from @OurSkyAI and @ObservableSpace, supported by COMSPOC’s optical network, reveal several significant activities in GEO between 6–8 June 2025. SHIJIAN-25 (SJ-25) performed four maneuvers between 6 June 01:50 UTC and 7 June 16:51 UTC, using a total delta-v”Follow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Hey, buddy. How's it going? A little friend down there doing a lot of little construction. I am. You look dusty. No, this is just gray in the beard. This is because I'm 40, not because I've been working on concrete.

No. My wife and I, we do a lot of home renovations, and we always joke that we're like, we're not in any way, professional builders or any kind of thing. So when we do work, we can't say that we were like, well, we did some carpentry or we did some like masonry always trying to come up with like words that sound kind of like that but aren't that like so we always call it carpentering that's when we put wood stuff together you know so today we were like you we haven't figured this one out yet for masonry but we were doing concrete blocks today but brick bricklisting or something i don't know we'll

have to figure it out so yeah i'm i'm living the mexican dream by making everything out of concrete it's awesome 2.10, 2.20, whatever it takes, right? You know. I don't endorse any of Jake's self-propelled projects down there. I just, I don't know. I do enjoy following your travails of, like, trying to get worked on and finding the right people to pay in different ways to do the thing that you need.

So I appreciate. I appreciate the insight down there. But Greg, you're here. Have you paid anyone off in Mead yet? That's the big question. No, not yet. No. I don't know.

They would take that. It's not worth much yet. Yeah, bad exchange rate. Did you bring any today, no, Jake. Did you bring any with you? Not me, no, but I got more very Mexican stuff. I spotted this at the grocery store. This is a new kind of mezcal.

from Oaxaca. A very fancy bottle. Is that a Jaguar with wings? Yeah, that's going to be like the I think there's a, is that a deer bottom too? It's like one of those like kind of like totem animals or whatever.

There's a lot of like Mexican iconography or Jaguar, Eagle. Yeah. That'll be the next ULA upper stage, whatever that animal's called. Aguara. yeah, pouring this here. Oh, it's very clear.

What actually is it? So mescal is like a, it's kind of like a smoky tequila. This is very, very clear. So I always kind of describe it as like if tequila was like whiskey. That's the way to think about it. Very nice, very nice. Greg, Gillinger. We got the payoff.

Gillinger, yes. Gillinger. You bring anything fun over there? What are you rocking? I did. I did. I stumbled on this a while ago. It's a pizza pork chronic ale.

So it comes in a, I don't know if you guys can see that or not. Hold on. I'm screwed up for, from our four guest show last week. Hold on. Guess two. There we go. No, hold on. There we go.

We're back. We're good. We got the one shot. What do you got? Show us that thing. All right. So it's a chronic amber from pizza port, which is a restaurant down in San Diego. So I live in Huntington Beach, California.

So I'm about two hours north of San Diego, about 35 minutes to three hours south of Los Angeles, depending on traffic. But it looks... I was waiting for that. It makes sense in my brain. And then I was like, oh, yeah, I get it. I understand where he's going with this. It's a good one.

So discovered a few years back, and it's begun a staple. So I appreciate the opportunity to do some day drinking with you guys. Yeah. It's very day time for you, too. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's a little bit of everyone. That's socially acceptable, I think.

Yeah, for coming, your workday is barely getting started out there in California. So, yeah, everybody just rolled in a couple hours ago. So, uh, I'm ready to go. Yeah. We're excited to have you. You're someone who I feel like we've not talked somehow for so long. And I'm like, how do we not? We've barely missed each other a couple of times.

So I'm glad that we finally sort of this out. Yeah. It's fantastic to be here. I'm listening to the show for, gosh, not to bring up old memories, but since we Martians went away and Jake, you guys took this to be the full-time thing, I remember listening to Miko right after I retired from the military in 2019, kind of discovered Miko. I can't remember if it was before or after the pandemic. It's all kind of hazy back then.

And I learned a lot from your show there and gradually moved into the off-nominal thing. it's like the like the beer it's actually become a staple of mine so i really appreciate all you guys do it's a big time for mars too jake you think about dusting off the old uh mars podcast man it's uh i was reading through some of that stuff there's some there's some good there's some good stuff in this recent uh news announcement this is not this is not a nothing burger i don't think i'm not like i'm not jumping jumping through the the big green checkmark just yet, but this is like, it's a good finding. I'm excited. I am.

You know, I am. That could really be a good proof point for the Coangelo theorem of life being normal rather than the exception. Yeah, I love it. I'm an extremist in this way. Yeah. So I take this as full proof. Me and Sean Duffy, I think both are like, listen, folks, it's life.

So far, the Duffy administration would be the same as the Calangelo administration here. as far as our takes on this. That was a very weird, weird announcement, I think, generally. Because they also, they had, didn't have a, they just had the podium with, then the people gathered around, and they were just kind of standing awkwardly by while, like, the guy who's in charge of,

but not in charge of NASA was going on at length about how, like, it's pretty sure it's life, but, like, you know, we don't really know yet. It was very odd, very odd event. Just paving away for your, where you're moving right into the media administrator. That's still in play, right? When I get the role, my first announcement is,

Listen, y'all, we all know life's everywhere. We just haven't really found it yet. And that's the official stance. The science is the time this will love me. The official policy of NASA. Yeah. Me and Dante Loretta probably agree. Oh, dear.

Anyway, we're not here to talk about that. Anthony, what are you? What are you bringing in? Oh, sorry. Yeah, I got a Cape May IPA. I kind of reorganized. We're in this Schroinger's kitchen at the moment. We're like, at any moment, our kitchen may be demolished for renovation.

And so we sort of half moved in. We moved in. We're kind of half moved in, but mostly stuff's still in boxes, and the fridge is not really organized the right way. So I was doing some drink management, and I just was in the mood for one of these. So you got to, this is the part of the year where you got to start calling the summer beers and making way for the other ones. So you got to start drinking the last of those seasonal ones before. for you can't really be drifting into Halloween time

with like a very summery beer hanging around still, you know? Because then it's there until next year. And then what you do? And what's the fish of the length? Like when Starbucks starts selling the pumpkin spice stuff, I mean, my daughter's going to have for that. I feel like they're going to move on.

It's like early September. Well, we have a good... I had a pumpkin spice for Appuccino like three weeks ago. You are that guy. That's crazy. Well, you don't have seasons down there, Jake. No, it's the summer. You do. Come on. Get out of your boat, you.

I'm at 33 degrees north, so there's some variation. Yeah, no, you have two seasons. Regular and then that time when all the, yeah, fire or not. I was going to say regular and the foggy time in May when everything is just gray and cold. And that's, yeah. May gray, followed by the June. Greg, you've been writing a lot about a hot topic of late, which is Russia and China, up to all sorts of different hijinks in space. And that was as much details we got until we were, like, closing in.

We were like, we figure there will be a lot to talk about when we booked you. And then, boy, howdy, has there been a lot to talk about? So where would you like to start in? Give us the overview first on integrity and everything that you're working on. Okay, so I've worked for a small company called Integrity ISR. We're scrappy bunch of folks, right? So we do a lot of different things. One of the things that we really focused on is space training.

So we do a lot of work with the U.S. Space Force. And we have people at Vandenberg Space Force Base, at Goodfellow Air Force Base, and at Kiesler Air Force Base training. Every enlisted member of the Space Force comes through some of our training. We also build the basic military training education as well for the Space Force. Among other things, like I said, we're a scrappy group. We install locks in place. We'll do whatever it takes, right? But we're kind of hard down in each charge.

Is that the idea? Yeah. The Space Force version of Letherman. So I retired Air Force officer. I was an Intel guy for 26 years. And my last couple assignments were with, it was before the Space Force stood up. But I was at Vanderberg, so about three and a half hours north of where I am now. And was in charge of the intelligence surveillance or reconnaissance division in the combined space operations center.

So a lot of acronyms I could throw out you. But I was doing space intel stuff before. It was cool to do space intel stuff. At first got started in like 2007 and 2009 when it wasn't especially the best career thing at that point. That's what I was being advised. It actually turned out fantastic for me. Anyway, it's part of training all of these individuals. I kind of took a step back and thought, I bet there's a lot of things out there in the unclassified world

that if you just knew what to look and kind of knew how to do some research and write things down, you might be able to come up with some interesting things that you could share internationally, right, or talk about it on a podcast or whatever it happens to be. And my altruistic vision was that I would put together such a newsletter and send it to all of the folks that we had going through training at these various places. And they would read it, fall in love and kind of turn into their own, become their own analysts, right? And really get to know what these other countries are up to to help it inform what they are doing day-to-day operationally. I don't know if I got there with that, but it has led me down to a pretty interesting path, so it's been about five years now.

I think the first edition, gosh, it was August of 2020 is when I first put that thing out. A little known backstory until now. My original vision for this thing was going to be a one-pager, and in a lot of military context, if you want to get your word out to the folks, you just tape it to the wall of the rest. restroom, right? So, the reason thing started out is the final frontier flush. But we sent it in and the guys are like, hey, this is really good. You know, we think we want to send it up to some bathrooms right now. There are no actual in-person bathrooms. I think their take was, hey, we want to

fear with our leadership, but this name thing is it's not the most professional. So we came up with the final frontier flash. And then after a few years and, and, you know, we're going to, you know, some success. My boss is like, hey, you can read this thing and never know it was written by anybody that's affiliated with Integrity ISRs. So we migrated to me. Integrity crashes, which is where it is now. But it's, I've learned more than anyone in putting it together, honestly. I mean, the amount that's out there right now, if you know how to use it and the tools that are available are really incredible, and to me, eye-opening. Yeah. Yeah, I find you, you can learn, uh,

tremendous amount about something by trying to teach others about it, right? So I think, Anthony, I know that. Yeah, I think this is a reason. Just based off of kind of, I know you guys, well, much better than you know me. But, you know, there's the classic graphic of they went to physics class, right? Graduated MIT, got a job at NASA, started playing curbel space program. And your level of overall mechanics understanding just shoots through the roof. It was kind of like that for me, right?

I had a whole much of training on, you know, how things operate in space, but until I had to actually break it down myself and look at graphs and try to recreate events and those sorts of things, it was a lot of it was lost on me until that point. Yeah, yeah. I find that, like, sometimes when I'm, you know, if I'm going to publish something where I have, like, a viewpoint on it, then, like, you know, my standard of evidence has to go up a lot higher and then, so then I'm always, like, asking my questions of myself, like, I'm poking holes in my own argument and then I'm doing the research to cover those holes and then I end up learning

more about the thing that I actually knew before I even had to take. It's always pretty funny. The only bad part is what some that works out is you do the research and you realize you were very, very wrong. You got to scrap whatever you were right. Yeah. I think they call that growth is what they call it. So, yeah.

Being a good person, like the thing that Jake was like, actually, the Hubble Space Telescope is good and worth the money. that would have been this whole. No, there's a graphic or blog post

for her so this whole like idea though of tracking the classified stuff

that the other countries do though right very tricky because you're drawing

you got to read a lot of between a lot of lines and then you got to correlate

a lot of things with well what are we doing and why is this

satellite in the orbit of the thing that I well in your case

may or may may not know about of what it's doing up there. So that's an interesting approach for me as well, though, from your perspective, someone who has seen our side of this kind of stuff. Does that help you understand what you might be seeing from the other militaries of the world? Or is it just as opaque because there's a huge gap of knowledge there?

To some extent it helps. I mean, it kind of gives you a little bit of context. Certainly you can't. There's a lot more detail available on certain things than others when you talk about space operations. What I found was there's a lot of really good reporting about what is going up into orbit, right? I mean, everybody loves a rocket launch, right? So even China tells us when there's a rocket launch.

They'll give us not a whole lot of detail as to what's actually going on there. But what they can't hide, at least that we know of, is, you know, what kind of orbit are they sending these things into? And what are they near, right? And a lot of things are available in the public catalog. And what's not available in the public catalog, there's a guy, Mike McCamp's who puts out another catalog that's pretty damn good. So there's a way to kind of compare things. So there's a lot that you can, what I've learned is there's a lot that you can get just

from basic press reporting to begin with and just simple naming conventions, right? Especially with the Chinese, right? All of their, I'm getting sure what I say all, but many of their ISRs, their intelligence. their intelligence collection systems, or Earth observation systems, if you will, they call Yaua. So if there's a Yaua Lodge, then I'm pretty interested in that.

And, you know, see where it relates to other satellites with that kind of name, right? And in the last few years or so, they've launched them in, you know, triplets, right? And some of these triplets form, we've orbited in interesting formations for a while, and then they would maneuver one of them

and the formation would fall apart and put it back together again, and now they'd have a ran opposite. So you can kind of watch it evolve. And what I found was that it wasn't really anybody looking at that stuff, right? Everybody's reporting on the launch and I pretty much forget about whatever happened after that, which is understandable, but you're missing, you know, literally the lifetime of that particular object in orbit. And in the past, maybe that was.

My headline style now, Jake. I'm going to have to revamp Nbiko headlines. Never talk about Yagon unless I'm talking about what happened on orbit. You got to really end up your investing in journalism. Yeah. Yeah, maybe you can get daunting, right? It's getting harder and harder because there's a lot more stuff going up. Yeah.

But yeah, but with headlines, right, if there's a, you do a great job capturing the launches and where things go, but you're moving on to the next launch and whatnot. So, and you may not know. So if I'm trying to send something out into GTO, we may not know where that thing settles in. and for, you know, 10 days, to two weeks in some cases. So, yeah, so it's understandable. So that's kind of the... So it's like, what am I going to do with it? What am I going to do when they're, you know, like,

I need you to then tell me, oh, these things did maneuver, and now they're doing something different. Are you, like, are you saying the Algonne shell game was just screwing with everybody, and then eventually they came back together in the same triplet, or they, like, mixed up what these things are actually doing, or they're trying to hide them to look like a triplet system, but they're actually independent?

I mean, there's a lot of context here, but for the particular Yaguan series I'm talking about now, is, sorry, that China does a lot of naming convention things that are, it has complexity, I'll just say that. So they'll just take the Yau-Gan 35, 36, and 39. So they launched them all into similar orbits, right? different planes, but basically they have five sets of triplets operating in five different orbital planes. I think that's right. So they had 15 of these triplets altogether. And initially when they went up, you'd have one of the, just say the Alpha satellite in the lead by about five minutes. There will be co-planer. Then you had the Bravo satellite about seven, five to seven minutes behind, and then the Charlie satellite was about a minute to two minutes behind. And all of the

were following this pattern until they started having some anomalies and some of the had some failures on it was what kind of what it looks like and and then all of a sudden they maneuvered like the trail to or the charlie satellites i just described into a lower orbit or they let the orbit degrade for a period of four or five months and then they bring it back up so when they did that there was a difference in the right essentially the ascending note or the ran difference so the twist of the order was a little bit different so now this one satellite is a little bit offset to the right offset to the west of the other two. And they operated like that for a couple years.

And then most recently, they basically pulled the plug on a lot of these triplets, raised the Bravo satellite up to a useful orbit and have basically left the, most of the, you know, Alphos and Charlie's kind of just degrade over time. It's kind of what I'm seeing. Now, I don't know exactly what they were doing, but in the past, they'd use that. They all went up to about a 500-kilometer orbit inclined at 30. degrees. So great, you know, that's a part of the world that they care about, 35 north to 35 south is, you know, South Japan, Southern Japan to Southern Australia. Your house. Not my house. Yeah. Just, yeah, I'm just two degrees below.

They're not worried about me. We're still learning about this. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So that was one example. And you've got other things going on in Geo Station or over. So it's not just in Leo. So I guess the point, the broader point is, it's getting to be a lot more dynamic. But those kind of things, those details also let you help. Like, part of this is trying to figure out what they're doing with these things, right? So do you have to, what is the process in that sense to try to figure out what these satellites are doing? Is it looking at the geometry and saying what would be useful with this arrangement of satellites? Yeah, sure.

In the one case with the West, is that like some side imaging that they're doing in addition to the top down? or? I'm hopeful that at some point we'll get commercial non-earth imaging that will allow us to look at a satellite and say, hey, that looks like a telescope, so that's probably an Earth observation satellite, or that looks like a big freaking antenna, so maybe that's a SAR satellite, or that looks like an omnidirectional antenna, so that's probably some sort of signals collection device, right? Now we're going to get in an era of building, like, you know, things that go over your satellite

that look like the other kind of satellite. That's going to be great. I know, I know, yes. The cat and mouse game will continue. You can tell you would typically not put a signals collection satellite at that low of an altitude, right? So for collecting signals, you want to have kind of a broader clip print. Another good example of where they've done some of this pairing that's they've actually talked about, which is they've got a Yagran 31, which is a triplet that flies in a equilateral triangle formation,

which is really, we've been doing that since the 70s, right? That's really indicative for, you know, doing RF detection and geolocation, right? So you've got time difference of arrival between all three satellites. They've got four of those. We have like a Navy constellation like that, right? Yeah, yeah. Yep. Got it.

I think, and commercial-wise, you've got Hawkeye 360 does something similar as well. So, but in this case, they've also got four Yaugan-34s, which they advertise as being some sort of imagery collection satellite that are offset a little bit on RAN and trailing those Eeyland satellites by about 10 minutes or so. So it seems logical that you would collect and geolocate with your ELIT satellites and then try to take an image of that

with the Yagaan 34 as it comes behind. So yeah, so there's the Yaghan 31 formation. Nice job on the graph. pull up there, Anthony. Yeah, man. Trying to Google real quick to help Jake out. It's right over my house there. That's right.

That's right. I don't know if they can pick up your starlight signal or not, Jake. So specific details, like what these things are capable of doing, right? And there's, I think there's some tradeoffs too, right? So in this case, with the Yaghan 31's, they're at about 1,100 kilometers.

And Yalgaon 34, in order to stay, you know, kind of relatively positioned to these things, is also at 1100 kilometers. Not ideal for an imagery satellite, right? That's about twice as far, maybe a little bit further than that away. So you're going to take a hit on your resolution there. But if you're looking for things like aircraft carriers that are significant size, maybe that's not that big of deal.

So who knows what tradeoffs they're making with some of these lower flying satellites? Maybe if they throw up enough of the signals collectors, that doesn't matter if they have a lower altitude, maybe they have the collections they need. And they find that that's a good tradeoff for whatever the other. satellites are doing, right? So, um, and it's, it changes. It changes. And things break, right? So, and now they're going on with go along and they're throwing up dozens of satellites and who knows what kind of capabilities those have on board, right? Man, I, I, I don't know why I've

never, like, thought through this through before, but like I had never ever considered the fact of, like, a small group of like different kinds of satellites working together into some sort of joint operation like that. Like I think in my head I've always just thought of like a satellite is like its own machine that does its own job or it's like a constellation where it's like a whole bunch of the exact same satellites doing the same service but like sharing the load, right? You know? I never considered this kind of like formation flying and then like this one's this kind and that guy and they're like communicating each other like oh hey I spotted this. Can you do your thing with that thing? And you know, that's interesting. I've never.

Yeah. Yeah. Multiconmonology is the way to go. Right. So how do you use? the most we see this in a lot of different domains as well right Air Lans sea domains as well

right you have specific ships for specific functions or specific things for doing doing specific functions

I found it interesting looking back at some old interviews they did I found an interview with one of the beta designers actually

and he was talking about China's goal is really to create kind of a space brain right

I mean as we operate and go through our daily lives. We're using all of our senses, which in and of themselves are interesting, but where the magic happens is between your ears, right? And the correlation of, you know, tipping and queuing between your eyes and your ears and your nose and your other senses, right? And could you do the same thing in space where you've, this may happen on orbit, or maybe it happens on the ground, but you have all of this information coming in from these different sensors

feeding into one thing that's able to then build out some decision, the information, right? And China's not the only one working on that, obviously. But I thought it was a great analogy, right? How do we merge, you know, position, navigation, and type of T, right, your GPS sorts of things, merge that with your communications, merge that with your eyes, sorry, your intelligence surveillance or reconnaissance to help you out if you're in some sort of contested environment, we'll say that, or competition, right? If you're trying to exert influence in the South China Sea or in the Taiwan Straits or whatever it happens to be. How do you get the best information to the folks that control your, in this case,

your long-range fires elements, right? So those surface-to-surface systems that can range thousands of miles. So against moving targets, right? So it's a tough problem, but, you know, China takes this up pretty seriously and takes long view and are doing some pretty interesting things. I'm sure that we are doing similar, interesting things. I'm not sure about that. I don't really look into what we call blue systems and what we do for that.

If there's a Chinese equivalent of me or somewhere over there, they're probably like, hey, cry me a river culture, right? You guys just watch, you know, six Starlink missions, which may or may not have had Star Shield on board and some Neroa things that we have no idea, right? And, you know, so, right. Well, so, all right, if Jake's, if Jake's naivete was, I never thought about satellites working together, mine is I just assume everyone can see everything

on Earth at all times and that like everyone's shooting video with every cell phone and planet is imaging every speck of Earth at every moment that like is it worth you know

because I assume some of this stuff is what the military internally is doing to get a sense for what can certain adversaries see or not see at any moment or if we want to hide something how should we do it but I'm just like nah screw it man everybody can see everything at all times

just figure something else out. I don't know, that's my naive take on that's right. So, but it's in the case that like getting a sense for this stuff also filters into the plans that we have on fleet management or where to place things or how to carry out an operation. It should. It should. So I would say that we're in the transition point right now of forever, at least until 1990s, right? We were using space to support other domains, right? We started dropping GPS guide munitions back in 1991 with the Gulf War.

And from that point, forward space has been really inextricably linked to our success in various operations, right? These other nations have learned from that and thought about, okay, how can we deny you that capability? But also, how can we build our own capabilities to kind of do what you do? I think we're in a period of adjustment of not being used to being the only ones in space or the only ones possessing those capabilities, right? We're really oriented to protecting our own shiny space objects, I would say. There's a lot of reporting on, you know, I notice this with a newsletter, too. If I do some sort of counter space story, I get a lot more attention, right?

But 99% of what, I'll say, China and Russia are doing is not counter space. It's building out these other capabilities that we use all the time to enable our airland and sea forces, right? And that's the point. And I think that's something that's challenging for us to adjust it because you're right. The coverage from government-owned or commercially operated Chinese systems, G-Len is a commercial company, but I'm sure there are linkages just like there are with our commercial companies into our military. you've got something called the Satrine warning, which is satellite transitory warning, which is, you know, if you're out there operating, a satellite is over your head at this time,

so you should cease activity or somehow mitigate that threat. Isn't that just always going off? Like, that's my naivance is like, I don't know, that thing's just red all the time. Don't do anything. Go under a tip, you know. Exactly. And you start thinking about, all right, the big thing with Carrey, is emission control or M-Con, right?

So, you know, turning off radios and those sorts of things, which really inhibits your ability to operate, right? I mean, you actually need to be able to talk to folks on radio. But if you've got, you know, in geostation area, you've got Chinese satellites that are signals collectors, right? You know, they're not moving, right? And they've got a pretty wide view. Now, you know, to do that collection,

they need to bore site in on certain areas. But, yeah, so, yeah. I think we're in a period of transition to getting used to the potential that we're always being monitored. And we're not used to that. So that's something we've got to adapt to. Yeah. And we've been seeing some of that pretty recently, too, like the cover-up kind of stuff.

Isn't Russia like, you know, like putting big, like tarps over their airplanes and stuff and, and. Inflatable ones. You're trying to hide. Yeah, the inflatable airplanes. That's right. Yeah. The balloon airplanes.

Yeah. Yeah, that's been going on forever. I mean, as long as you can fool the guy that's dropping the bomb, guy or gal that's dropping the bomb, and to blow up the balloon next to your real tank, then you've done your job. Yeah. Tama 5, conceal one deception is definitely a big thing.

And something we're going to have to get better at as well. You talked about the counter space stuff getting a lot of attention when you write about it. There's been a series of missions in the last year that have even broken outside of the space circles, right? There was, I don't know if this is counter space related, but there was the whole, like, Russia's about to launch the whole nuke thing in space and the ride-along stories that came with that.

I don't really know where that ever shook out, to be honest. Like, it still gets referenced by very high-ranking individuals, but I don't know in your way that you told me I don't follow up enough on Yau-Gun. Can we follow up on this satellite? What the hell was going on with that thing? So you're talking about Costco's 253. Obviously, that's exactly. Yeah, that's what I was thinking to.

Take your go. Take your go. I was looking at, so I was taking some notes for our meeting just the other day. I was kind of making a timeline. And it turns out the October 2021 to February, late, to say one March of 2022, it's pretty sporting. He had, you know, Chejjjong 21 launched out of China. Cosmos, then they, I was in August. October. Then in November, Russia decides to shoot down their Cosmos 1408 and cause a significant

debris event with their new doll, a direct-to-scent ASAT missile. In January, that Chejong 21 captures a piece of space junk out at geostationary orbit and holds it away. And then in early February, you had the launch of Cosmos 2553 in the subsequent release of information from from U.S. officials saying, hey, this looks weird, right? And we're concerned that there may be a nuclear device on there. And they put it into a really strange orbit, which makes it

hard to collect on, right? So this thing was I think the apogee, I think it was fairly circular orbit, and I think it was about 2,000 kilometers, was its summer major axis, right? So away from, you know, imagery satellites that may be able to take some collection on it

and give you some sort of characterization of it. and its inclination was funny too it was like 67 degrees or something like that so a difficult collection challenge most recent thing I heard so Leo Labs did a great report they collaborated with Maxar who was able to Leo Labs you know looking at photometric returns from this thing noticed some anomalies and then Maxar was able to look at it with one of their I think it was one of their worldview or Legion satellite I can't remember

Joan is, they could kind of confirm as well from these two different phenomenologies that this thing is no longer stable. So that was back a few months ago, I'd say. So it looks like it's no longer stable. But it used to say that they're, we don't know that what was on there, right? I don't think anyone's come out and said, hey, there's a nuclear device on there. I think folks that pretty much sell them on it was kind of a test article of some form. I don't know if that makes anybody feel any better. But the thing's tunneling now. So I think. what could go wrong, right? Tumbling nukes, no biggie.

My whole thing with the test article is, like, the anti-satellite test. I'm like, you took out a satellite. It wasn't, you tested it, but you also did it. It's like, this was not a thing that was, yeah, we tested it, and it was there for a minute. It was like, you did the thing. This was my bugaboo back then. So same deal.

I feel like when you launch stuff to an orbit that takes forever to decay, you might have been testing it, but you're also doing it. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, and at the end of February, obviously, Russian invades Ukraine. So I think there was a fair amount of messaging. Not that the Chinese stuff had anything to do with that, but between the directs to send ASAT kinetic tests and the launch of a questionable satellite into a difficult to collect on orbit. I'm sure there were other messages being sent through the other domains as well, but certainly in the space domain, that was, I think that was a messaging. Here's my thing, though. It's a spicy time for low sleep for everyone working on a shift. The whole aspect of this being like Russia launching a nuclear satellite. It's like we launched a nuclear satellite to Mars a couple of times. You know, we've launched nuclear satellites else.

There just seemed like there was so much room for whispered on the lane misunderstanding of what the thing was. And no one clearly stated this is a nuclear bomb that they're putting in orbit that I don't know what to do with the storyline. And then the only people that have really referenced that are people that I would assume got whispered down the lane to some weird info and are still saying they launched a nuke to orbit. And I don't know.

It would be nice if Russia gave us some clarity on that point, right? Probably would be helpful. You bastards are relying on Starlink and we're going to put out something that could really hurt Starlink pretty quick. Yeah, yeah. Right. So if you start thinking about all the systems that, the commercial systems right now,

I'm guessing none of them are harmed for that sort of activity, right? You kind of mentioned, you know, what have we done? And we've actually detonated nuclear devices in Lower Earth orbit. It was a test. It was a test. Coolest name ever, right? Also, knocked out all the power in Hawaii, but it was a test. Yeah, yep, knocked out all the power.

And 33% of the satellites that were up at that time, which was probably like seven. Just a test. So, you know, I've got to figure out what's going to happen, right? So, yeah, that was, and they continue to do interesting things, right? And we talk about China and talk about Russia in terms of what sort of counter space sorts of things they're up to right now. Russia, for its part, is getting, to me, more, they are far more aggressive than what I see coming out of China when it comes to, you know, counterspace messaging, we'll call it that, or their activities there. I mean, and part of that, too, is that they have. less to lose, right? Like, they've already

lost so much in the last couple of years, and both people and position in the world and economic strength and obviously the space industry brain drain, like, they don't have a lot to lose on that front acting in that manner.

And China's in a more precarious position when they look at their geopolitics. And practically speaking... Scarier, I think, honestly. Practically speaking, Russia relies on space to their other domains far less than certainly what we do and what China aspires to. So for Russia, the fight is close in, right? If it isn't close in, it's ICBMs and then all bets are off at that point.

But it's Ukraine, it's Eastern Europe, it's those sorts of things. So it doesn't really require space support, right? They kind of started getting into that a little bit more when they started operating in Siri, which I think is probably a test case for what they were going to try and do in Ukraine. China is a different matter, right? So China you're talking about, I don't know if you've ever flown from Hawaii to Korea or Hawaii to Japan, but that Pacific Ocean is immense. So for China with their claims of the South China Sea and certainly with Taiwan, and our forces positioning in the Western Pacific, that's a large area, right? And if you're going to be able to

find whatever targets you're after, over the horizon detection and communication is essential. And when you say over the horizon, that is space, right? That's how you do that. So that's why China is significantly investing in their not just counter space capabilities, but their space capabilities writ large. Yeah. I mean, China is basically speed running like a country development cycle, right. You know, they're trying to do what the United States did in like one third the time, right? And they're doing pretty good job so far at it. Yeah. They're not going, a loon program, ISS, military infrastructure. It's like all of the same time, everything. Like, like, I will be an article today about the shipbuilding facilities in China now. And they're like, they're churning out like destroyers and cruisers.

like those, you know, kind of like the, the hammer and nail warships, you know, like the sort of like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the ones that are getting all the, but they're, I think that was the name. They're, uh, they're, uh, they're, uh, I don't even. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah. Yeah. The famous influence that J.K. Rowling had on the U.S. military in World War II. Yeah. I just mean that the, the, the, the ships that are, like, just sort of doing the run-and-the-mill job. I think is the thing you're talking about the cutting edge aircraft carrier that has lasers and deploy. Yeah, listen, man, they were pumped out. You know where they were pumped out of?

Delaware River right here in Philadelphia and Chester. Not anymore, bud. Things out. Yeah. Not anymore. China's got you beat, man. They're bigger and they're building faster. It's wild.

Similar with electronic vehicles as well. You may not be the first one on one of those ships. I don't know. But yes. Yeah, the EV stuff, actually a really good example. Not in any related to space, but just to show like the scale and velocity that they're moving at, right? Because like, yeah, they're just enormous. Well, having an authoritarian government gives you certain latitudes to set a course and follow it, right?

I mean, we're seeing what. We're becoming painfully aware of this as we're seeing things kind of shift back and forth now and whatever's happening when that's, all that stuff, right? where in China, it's like 1990, early 1990s, right? So Taiwan had an election and elected somebody that was more pro-independent than China cared for. So China decided to launch some of their surface-to-surface missiles over Taiwan. And I think they launched four missiles, and three of them went bad. And they blamed the lack of GPS.

They thought that we had actually shut off GPS, and that's what caused these things to malfunction. And there was a lot of anguish, caused by that. Senior military officers saying it was a great day of great shame and whatnot. And from that day forward, they said, damn it, we're going to have our own. And they start off with Baydow 1, which we all kind of laughed at. They put this damn thing out in geostationary orbit. And, okay, it's geosynchronous orbit. Because some of these things are inclined quite a bit. But to get your position, you have to send a signal up to get it back to tell you where

you're at. Okay, you'll please do that because that really helps us target you. But that's kind of where they started. But over the next 25 years, you saw the, the, the medium Earth orbit layer come in. You saw the geostationary stuff get better. They inclined you. And now their beta is world class. And there's a lot of things that GPS certainly can't do. I mean, they are able to pass messages and sorts of things through beta.

So it kind of doubles as that, you know, PNT and communication system, right? So certainly they take the long. One web is so jealous. They're like, God damn, if only we could do that. Well, they're looking at Starlink right now. I'm thinking, yeah, we need to be able to do that too. They being China, certainly, and that's where, you know, Guo Wang and this Kianfong, and I'm mispronasing that name.

And then a car company out there is launching its own, you know, proliferated Leo constellation as well, the GILI corporation. I have the same problem with them as I do with you. Like, how do I pronounce these G's, you know? Like, what am I on that? The Gowong stuff is interesting, too, because it, it happened all of a sudden that they were just like, right, we're into the deployment phase now. And they're deploying via multiple launchers.

You know, there seems to be different classes of these satellites contributing. Some get launched on a big rocket. Some get launched on a smaller rocket. But they're, I mean, shit, they're flying off faster than Project Kuiper satellites at this point. So Amazon, maybe getting a little nervous that they're third in the running here. They just changed out their entire leadership team like a few months ago. So that may have had something to do with it. But you're right.

From somebody that's trying to track all this stuff as it's going up, it's been, August was a hectic month for sure. Thankfully, the other two kind of cooled off, especially the Kampon. I think the biggest problem I have with these is not just tracking the launch, as I said, but then trying to track to see if these things actually make it

to their desired overall altitudes, right? Which can take weeks or months. So that's, I probably am doing that in a far more manual process than others could. But it's a- It's called Jonathan McClain. hell up. I feel like, hey, man.

Send me these, send me these charts. Yeah. That guy's awesome. You just got to hook you two up. I love it. He's been super helpful for me and probably doesn't even know it. But he's been fantastic. I think that's his point.

That's good. He'd be happy to hear that. That would be a successful mission statement from him. But, I mean, I think one of the more interesting things going is something I don't think anybody has ever done before is the China attempting a refute. refuel another object in geostation or geosynchronous orbit, I should say. I don't want the astronauts coming after me. But so back in, like I mentioned before,

Xi John 21 launched in November of 2021, October, excuse me, and went up in a couple months later, you know, I don't think it docked. I think it netted or a carpooled or something, piece of space debris. The interesting thing was the one that launched. trying to say, hey, this is an orbital debris mitigation experiment. So folks like me, that's interesting.

So they kind of announced some tensions. And it was pretty impressive. A couple months later, they actually did that. And they were able to cart this or haul the, I think it was a compass satellite that was kind of defunct and kind of wandering through the geo belt. So they actually did the world of favor, grabbing this thing. Now, they did it in a pretty great. aggressive fashion and maneuvered made some fairly significant maneuvers during daylight hours

to make it more difficult to kind of track them but the folks at exo analytics did a really great job there's a video out there kind of explaining everything that happened I hope that's it I don't know this is 21 and 25 is that we're looking at that's we will get to 21 25 right now I'm just describing 21's hauling out of the compass satellite all that is precursor where you're at right now, which is, so SJ21 hulls out, the compass satellite, drops it off into super synchronous orbit, so it's no longer a hazard to anyone, and then 21 comes back to the geosynchronous orbit, right? But it's inclined to like 10.2 degrees, so pretty, pretty hefty inclination,

and it stays there and really doesn't maneuver for two, three years. And, you know, come up to January of 2025, oh, look at that, there you go. You got it. This is the compass satellite. Now I'm slow. Is this we're talking about? I'm about to be a seasick based on what I'm watching here. Like I am spinning out over here.

You've got it. You've got it. So they successfully did an orbital debris demonstration, right? Piece of debris that was meandering through the geo belt. They hauled it away. And then they put themselves back into an orbit that was fairly significantly inclined for something in geo, right? Not many objects are inclined to that extent.

It just kind of was there dormant for until just recently, right? So this is in, you know, February, March 2021 is, or 2022, excuse me, when it did all of that debris mitigation stuff and then just kind of stood set there. Then January of 2025, so nine months ago, China launches SJ25. And on the launch announcement, they say, hey, this is for, you know, orbital, I can't remember the exact words, but orbital sustainment demonstration or refueling. I think they may have called out refueling specifically. And so this thing went up in orbit and, you know, folks like me noticed right away that,

hey, this thing is inclined, it's plane matched. So it's got the same inclination. It's got the same RAN as SJ21. Isn't that interesting? That's something you don't do by accident. kind of both satellites were manufactured by the same organization in China. So maybe there were some collaboration there. Maybe this was the plan all alone.

SJ25 just kind of hangs out. They're separated by about 20 degrees of longitude at this point. So there's several thousand kilometers away from one another. But closing that gap with the plane match, that's the hard part, to bring two satellites close together if their plane match is pretty trivial. after apparently running through some system checkouts with SJ25 for a few months in June of this year, 2025, we see SJ25, a 21, excuse me, increase its altitude, if we call it that, start a westward drift, rapid westward drift like four degrees a day.

And we see SJ25 drop its altitude to drop to begin drifting eastward, not quite as fast, but significant. and then they meet up over the course of a week, right? And then you see they adjust their altitude so they're matching. You see them do a couple of test runs where they get closer and closer and then pull away, kind of take stock and then do it again. And then on July 2nd we see them come together and apparently they duck. So what we know is all based on ground-based sensors. So all we know is that these things got close enough together that we couldn't tell the difference

between one and the other using either radar telescopes or optical telescopes or any sort of RF sensing. So they said they were in dock. It looks like they docked and since July 2nd they've been docked, right? Or they've shown up as a single dock to our different space domain and where sensors. In the video you're just showing, you'll notice that there were three or four objects actually listed there as well. Right. So obviously, I'm not the only guy tracking this stuff. There are hundreds of professionals out there that are doing this for a living.

And some of those professionals operate the geostationary space situation or various programs satellites, or everyone is GSAP. And there are a couple of them in that area to observe a lot of this activity. It does point out some of the challenges, though. You know, GSAP is fuel limited. And with SJ21 and SJ25 being as inclined as they are, that means they're going to be going up to 10 degrees north latitude and 10 degrees south latitude, whereas GSAF is stuck between, I think they're about one degree inclined, right?

So between one north and one south. So there's 80% of the time those Chinese satellites are very close to any of our GSAF vehicles, which we're in the area, though, to monitor to see how things are progressing. So it's not quite the end of the story. So they've been docked since the 2nd of July and kind of stayed that way. So we're kind of waiting to see what happens next. And then in mid-March over the course of a week or so, I'll hear about it if I got this wrong. But I think they made the largest maneuver in geo orbit ever when they dropped six degrees of inclination, which is a huge fuel one, right?

So, yeah, it's a chart like I've never seen. Some folks say it wasn't that big of manure. We did some of the calculations, not doing all of the details, but it should have been in excess of 330 meters per second worth of fuel. Typical communication satellite launches with 1,000 meters per second to last it, you know, 15, 20 years that it's going to be up in operating. Yeah. So it was a large plane change in there.

I think we're safe in saying that. So now it's at about 4.4 degrees in clash. It went from 10.4 down to 4.4. Yeah. When I got to that point on the chart where you learned Curbel Space, program, that's where I realized that plane changes in geo are very, very expensive. Yes, they are. Yes, they are. Think of, you know, it's easy to speed up or slow down your car going, you know, five kilometers per second, right? It's very difficult to turn your car going

five kilometers per second. That's essentially what a plane change is, right? So, so now it's, it's, now we're waiting to see what happens next. So it did this massive maneuver with the two satellites. Right. My assumption is that SJ25 took the majority of, provided the majority of that energy, right? So SJ21 I look at as a rental car. You want to drop that thing off full. So the question is now, is this their, what's at 4.4 degrees that they want to have SJ21 go do? I think it would be quite a flex if they were to have SJ, you release SJ21, have to do another debreed removal experiment. That would be a complete end-to-end test, I think.

And then, so that's really what the question is now for everyone is. Is 4.4, is the current orbit the one they want to be in, or is there more maneuvers to happen while they're still docked with one another, or are they going to go their separate ways? What's the next likely target for SJ25 to try and refuel? China does have some interesting satellites that are 2.9 to 3.0 degrees inclined. it would be great to try to to tell us, but they haven't really said anything other than,

hey, this is a refueling experiment. That's about the extent of it. So we'll have to wait and see what happens. Man, just having to do all these divinations from like, just very imprecise, low resolution data and reading up on little radar specs.

And, oh, man, just trying to like parse out intention from that is like, that's a heck of a, heck of a puzzle. Because it's also easy to assess. and say, oh, well, what are they doing at 4.4 degrees inclination? It's easy to assess that as like that's where they intended to be versus they were trying to make it a three and they failed.

Yeah, they screwed up. Yeah. Like that's possible to discern. Yeah. Maybe the damn things are stuck together and they're trying to do a big maneuver to swing it off. Yeah, exactly. They're just spending all of that people trying to shake it off and they ended up getting down

those degrees inclination. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, I kind of was holding out hope that maybe, because this would be a first, right, to refuel another object in geo, right? I'll make that clear, right? So there have been refueling experiments in Leo. I understand that. But out in the geosaccharacterous environment, this will be the first.

So for China, I think that would be something to brag about, especially when you're knocking the boughs off your own ships in the Philippine Sea, right? I may want to, hey, we actually know what we're doing here. We just did this thing in space. It's pretty cool. But so far, they haven't listened to my advice, unfortunately. I feel caught up, Jake. I feel like this is one of those things where it's like I had four questions and then answering them gave me 104 questions. I'm like, I know less about what China is doing with their spacecraft now than I did before.

you know you know that you know less now yeah yeah what's the in the on the graph you're known unknowns you're known unknown it's not way bigger no what's the what's the thing the thing really like the less you know about something the more confident you are about it right oh yeah it's like dunning kruger yeah that's the one dunning kruger yeah so i just fell down the thing i just fell down into that very dark part of the middle of the chart there I think the smartest ever was when it was probably about 14 or 15. I think that's, and I've seen that pattern with my kids as well, right?

They absolutely know everything and I know absolutely nothing at this point. Yeah, I've just been perpetually getting dumber for the last 20 years. That's fair. At least the last seven and I knew you. Yeah. Greg, what, can you plug like where people can read? Let's follow along with this. Where can Jake stay up?

Yeah, so if you, yeah, if you want to subscribe to the newsletter right now, it's free. So go to ISR University is kind of where we house things or if you just do a Google

search on Integrity Flash you can find us there. Thank you. That's it right there. We've got an archive there as well. It's been kind of a labor of love.

I've been building it for the last five years. Sometimes more labor than love, but I should be kicking out the next edition this weekend. But I got a lot of work to do between now and then. But I really appreciate you guys

having me on. That's great. Yeah, we'll have to come back and do it. Yeah, this stuff is not getting any less complicated. We didn't get to... We didn't get to Russia, really, so it's... No, and there's some crazy stuff going on in the geo with Russia, man. It's not a two-minute thing, though.

All right, we'll check the calendar. I think we got some October openings. Yeah, we're going to... So, circle back on the Russians. All right, sounds good. Next week, Jake, I think we got a good one next week, right? Let's see. Because I mean, this one is also good.

Drake, don't get me wrong. Sometimes I would go to plug next week and I'm like, I don't know about this one. Next, next week, Christian Davenport's coming back, Jake. Got a new book. Got a new book. This is the new book that's the same book. New book.

Friendship ended with old book. New book is my best friend or whatever. What's the meme? It's called like space entrepreneurs, the heroic story of three. Tens of billionaires. That's the first time. I've had a chance.

I correspond with him every now and again, and he's doing some great work there at the Washington Post, and Space Barrens was amazing, and I'm sure his next book is going to be as phenomenal. It just has Les Branson, I think. Yeah. That's probably the one that exited, right? Yeah, Les Branson more back.

Is that what it's going to be? It must have figured out. Could be. Yeah. It could be that. I don't know. We'll find out. now the bex in the three-coma club he gets to be in the in the daven part that's right yeah he's made it

he's graduated from ashley vance up actually vans likes the struggling startups and then they go up from there oh man dunking on the friends it's always good jake it's always a good time yeah yeah what else you should you want to make people pay attention to read up anything you I'll read up on for your Russian show that you're coming back for in several weeks. I'll say it's all in there on the integrity flash there if they're interested. The back issues are there as well. So I think you got it pretty quick. If the orbital mechanic is a challenge for you, as it was for me, when I first got started,

we offer several courses as well. Some of them do at your own pace, others we lead you through. So we're always always looking to make people smarter about space and how things work and to disavow them of any notion that it's anything like Star Wars. Take that, everybody. They're not doing dogfight up there and they're sitting there speeders.

We will see you next time, y'all. Bye. Thanks, Greg. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one. End of death.