Edit: to their defense… my laptop was compromised at the time due to a Realtek chip supply chain hack that was persistent. The exploit was associated with “redgobot”.
Any serious military is tracking all known imaging/SAR satellites and uses their fly-by times (which are entirely predictable) for moving stuff covertly. I.e. you want to be out in the open in Area 51 testing a new RQ-180 derivative only when no one can be looking at you right now.
Also, there are global ADS-B satellite relays, and frankly I don't know why this data wasn't logged for MH370 - it must be explained somewhere. There's a guy on Twitter who captures those on a custom antenna + BladeRF setups (this data is plugged into adsbexchange for oceanic routes coverage). AIS relies even more on satellite relays, as the curvature of the planet limits signal propagation much more than for airplanes. What you see on any AIS website is mostly from a satellite.
The logged transmission round trip GroundStation -> Sat -> Aircraft -> Sat -> GroundStation provided an non unique "arc of travel" across the globe that was used by Australia to narrow the search area to a truckload of ocean floor that was substantially smaller than the entire planet.
The archived versions of the logs saved by the Malaysian gov are:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160304040818/http://www.dca.go...
Alternating sat routing would have given a more definitive fix and removed the ambiguity.
It’s possible that NRO has a later observation of MH370 than any that have been publicly disclosed, but it would be sheer luck to have, like, video of the disappearance.
