A column about curious stories from the worlds of science, technology, and film. Today — space again, but this time not about how people want to sell something up there, but about how hardware refuses to die on schedule. At the end of October, NORAD data showed a brief and very loud event: one of the low-orbit internet satellites in Russia’s «Рассвет» constellation, long written off by everyone, began gaining altitude instead of burning up in the atmosphere as planned. In nine days — from 221 to 295 kilometers, up 74. Just a week and a half earlier, specialists had expected it to enter the dense layers of the atmosphere “in the coming days” — by some estimates, roughly the next day. Instead, the spacecraft climbed, as though someone had started talking to it again. There is no official explanation from either the operator or journalists. But for old-school technical people, the news brought not surprise but recognition: stories about zombie satellites have been piling up in this industry for sixty years, and some of them are still no better explained than today’s case.
Let’s first reconstruct the timeline, because it is almost a detective story on its own. The «Рассвет» constellation is being deployed by the private company Bureau 1440 — Russia’s equivalent of Starlink: the same low orbits, the same logic of “a thousand cheap spacecraft instead of three expensive ones.” So far, 32 satellites have been launched; by 2028, they promise around three hundred. Low orbit is the price of low signal latency: a spacecraft at an altitude of a few hundred kilometers is constantly slowed by the residual atmosphere and must periodically fire its engine to avoid falling. Those without enough thrust or fuel drop out of orbit and burn up: with Starlink’s thousands of spacecraft, that is routine business, several a day.
With «Рассвет», it has not yet become routine. Back in June, the first lost spacecraft — NORAD catalog number 68363, from the batch launched in March — failed to fire its engine and burned up. In August, specialist observers noted that two satellites from the next batch — No. 17 and No. 23, launched in July — were sitting at an average altitude of 290 kilometers, with their perigees sinking and no maneuvers in sight. On October 27 came the news: two spacecraft had dropped below 230 kilometers and, by every law of ballistics, would burn up very soon. The calculations aligned all the more neatly because three losses out of thirty-two had been expected. Everything was proceeding as usual — then NORAD data updated on October 29, and it turned out that one of the “buried” satellites had risen from 221 to 295 kilometers in nine days. It did not “slow its descent”; it rose: 74 kilometers from an altitude where the atmosphere is denser still is not chance or measurement error, but a decisive series of maneuvers. Blogs that retold the story put it honestly: of 32 spacecraft, two will now deorbit instead of three — unless the second “corpse” changes its mind too.
The strange thing is not the altitude gain itself — spacecraft do that every day. The strange thing is WHO did it. A spacecraft brought down to 221 kilometers is, by ground-based logic, a corpse: uncontrollable, its resources exhausted, its estimated time of death less than a day. And corpses, as we know, do not fire their main engines. The history of spaceflight knows three explanations for such a case — “the owner beat every forecast and said nothing,” “tracking data fooled someone,” and “the machine woke up on its own” — and today’s story does not yet say which is right. But three historical parallels suggest why those who believe in technology should hold off on conclusions.
The first chapter of the modern zombie canon began in 1965, when the U.S. Air Force and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory were launching the LES military communications satellite series — Lincoln Experimental Satellite. LES-1 was meant to be the first of nine: an experimental machine with an array of solar panels, testing ideas that would later underpin military satellite communications. It went wrong on ascent: an error in the electrical circuitry prevented the spacecraft from separating from its upper stage, and LES-1 remained in the “wrong” elliptical orbit. In 1967 it fell silent forever — the craft vanished into silence, the catalog marked it as nonfunctional scrap metal, and everyone went about their business for forty-five years.
In December 2012, British radio amateur Phil Williams, call sign G3YPQ, was scanning the 237 MHz band and caught something professional catalogs considered impossible: a faint but distinct telemetry signal, recurring every four seconds. The source was LES-1. The spacecraft, silent for 45 years, its batteries dead since 1967, had begun reporting in again. The classic reconstruction of what happened goes like this: the battery-charging circuit shorted out at some point — and the solar panels stopped trying to charge the dead battery and began powering the machine directly whenever sunlight hit them at the right angle. The spacecraft tumbles as it does so: the cycle of “flashed on — spoke — went dark” repeats precisely as the body turns. Nobody ordered the revival, nobody sent any command from Earth, there was no secret plan: the electrical system changed, the illumination changed — and a dead communications node turned into a beacon. Amateurs caught it on its operating frequency and “talked” to it for another year — simply because they could.
Years later, LES-1 would have repeated today’s «Рассвет» story exactly if its orbit had allowed it to maneuver: it has no engines, and it is still tumbling to this day. But the trajectory is not the point; the lesson is. In a machine built in 1965, without a single microchip, inside a four-hundred-kilometer oven-refrigerator, a working route from “sun — panels — transmitter” appeared after 45 years. If that is possible with relays and transistors from an era when integrated circuits did not yet exist, then the question of whether a modern spacecraft can wake from a coma is not a question of physics, but of statistics.
The second precedent is the most polished in history: Amateur Satellite OSCAR 7, or simply AO-7, an amateur satellite launched in November 1974. A perfect machine on paper: a relay satellite for radio amateurs around the world, which worked for five years — until June 1981, when its battery finally failed and the craft disappeared into oblivion. For twenty-one years, the catalog kept AO-7 marked as dead: launched when satellites in orbit could still be counted on one’s fingers, degrading before the eyes of the first generation of internet enthusiasts, thoroughly obsolete both physically and morally.
On June 21, 2002, radio amateur Pat Gowan, G3IOR, switched on his receiver and could not believe his ears: 145.972 MHz, the old familiar telemetry tone. AO-7 had begun reporting in again. The mechanism of its resurrection almost word-for-word repeated LES-1’s: at some point, the dead battery stopped being dead in the final sense — it became a circuit element, shorting itself out, and on clear days the repeater was powered directly from the panels. Sunrise — it switched on; sunset — it fell silent. It flies alive, sleeps dead, and has done so to this day: a spacecraft that “died” in 1981 still comes on the air during sunlit passes, nearly fifty years old, older than most of the operators working through it.
The story of AO-7 also has a plotline that is still told with pride in distant Poland, and with respect for the irony of the situation in engineering circles. While official headquarters considered the craft dead, Polish radio amateurs in the Solidarity movement used it — in precisely those years: messages passed through its transparent repeater, bypassing state control. A machine that had not existed in the catalogs for years worked as an underground mailbox — bypassing the very fact of its own existence. Official specifications failed to kill it — politically or technically.
The third precedent is of a different kind, but it is needed for the full picture because it demonstrates a third strategy for longevity: not “come alive after death,” but “don’t die — change careers.” The GOES-3 weather satellite, launched by NASA and NOAA in June 1976, had faithfully observed the atmosphere over its sector of the United States since 1978, until onboard equipment failed in 1989 — and the craft was repurposed. It became a communications relay in the PEACESAT project, connecting Pacific island communities: no longer serving civilian meteorology, but acting as a “telephone exchange” for school and hospital networks on the islands. Then came a chapter that NASA still recalls with something close to pride: from 1996 onward, GOES-3 became the main communications link between American polar researchers and the South Pole station — scientific data from Amundsen–Scott traveled through it to the mainland for several hours a day, and for twenty years this slow channel remained effectively the station’s main one. A satellite built before the first Apple Macintosh stayed on duty until 2016 — 38 years in service, the last twenty in a job it had not been designed for. It is an important story as a counterweight: zombie satellites are not just “rose from the grave,” but also “sold the coffin and went back to work.”
We have reached the central question: how is it even possible for a machine with no source of control to begin behaving as if it were alive? Engineering answers with relatively little sentiment: a satellite is not an animate object but a circuit, and a circuit behaves according to the connections it currently has, not according to what the documentation says. The first standard revival scheme is a short circuit in the battery. You cannot charge the battery, but if a cell has shorted itself, then the serial chain of “solar panels — battery — load” becomes “solar panels — wire — load” — and the machine gets direct power from the panels, a few watts at a time. As the body rotates, its passage through sunlight alternately powers and shuts down the circuit: to an observer below, it looks as though the craft “periodically comes alive and dies,” when in fact it is simply spinning. Two zombies out of three — LES-1 and AO-7 — came back this way.
The second scheme is that the battery is outside the circuit entirely: some equipment remains in direct contact with the panels even when, according to the paperwork, everything is de-energized. The third is record-breakingly mundane: cataloging and tracking errors. Modern networks of radar and optical observers track tens of thousands of objects; a satellite believed dead can remain listed as resurrected for years until someone finally merges two entries into one. In the 2020s there were well-known cases where a “revived” object in NORAD data turned out, on closer inspection, to be merely a numbering error rather than a miraculous resurrection.
And the fourth, the most sober one: not every “revival” is electronics. Spacecraft with an intact propulsion system and even a partially functioning control system are capable of the most spectacular kind of “resurrection” — a ballistic one. For that to happen, power has to reach the receiver and transmitter, commands from Earth have to reach the onboard computer, and then it has to begin a series of maneuvers. Each step is unlikely in itself, but all of them lie within the realm of physical possibility. And this is where today’s «Рассвет» story runs into the episode’s main question: a rise of 74 kilometers is not a flash from an overheated circuit, it is a flight plan, a matrix of maneuvers. A modern spacecraft cannot accidentally set off upward. Behind seventy-four kilometers gained over nine days at an altitude of two hundred kilometers lies engine work — the only question is who controlled it and how: the same operator, simply keeping quiet; an unexpectedly restored chain of onboard automation; or something else that open data do not reveal.
The first version is the dullest and therefore the most plausible: control returned, and the owner carried out a series of maneuvers without accompanying them with any statements. The logic is flawless: the constellation is private, commercial, competing with Starlink — 32 satellites against six thousand; every sign that “our satellite, which everyone buried, suddenly flew again” is both bad news about the reliability of its main engines and, at the same time, good news about spacecraft survivability. Disclosure brings no PR benefit. While the craft silently makes its way to operational orbit, everyone else stays silent too. The «Рассвет» case would also fit a more prosaic scenario: regulatory minimalism, in which the owner’s team simply sees no reason to comment on every orbital change. And so the original source of the entire global news wave turns out to be an updating public NORAD table, read by enthusiasts all over the planet.
The second version is technical-detective fiction: a chain of failures played the role of a temporary reviver, as it did with LES-1 and AO-7. If a short occurred in the battery circuit and something in the remaining automation received power, one can theoretically imagine a sequence of pulses knocked into a random state that opened the valves and let the engine fire — for instance, in an uncontrolled burn of the remaining fuel. But here engineering mathematics rises like a wall: to climb 74 kilometers, the spacecraft must gain a noticeable amount of specific energy, and a random sequence of impulses does not cut it. Almost always, such a crookedly initiated departure goes not upward but downward, accelerating degradation. For the craft to head upward by accident, chance itself would have to be an optimist. It happens, but the odds are several orders of magnitude lower than for the “it was controlled” version.
The third version is the most suspicious and the most interesting: a data error — in other words, no resurrection at all, just duplicate accounting or catalog lag. But there is a problem here too: the very figure of “74 kilometers in nine days” appeared openly in the public NORAD catalog; thousands of pairs of eyes saw it, including amateurs who independently reproduced the trajectory. You cannot hide an error like that even if you want to, and it has not gone anywhere: observers have the initial and final vectors, and the intermediate points. The weak point of the theory is not that there is no data, but that there is too much of it.
No official word has been heard — and that is perhaps the most precise marker of the whole story. In 2026, a fact not confirmed by a statement from the owner became a “mystery” in the very first news item. But note this: none of the professional observers took it as supernatural. Zombie satellites are an ordinary property of technology, not an anomaly: it simply has no habit of dying for good on the day someone decides to cross it off the list.
Outside the brackets of resurrection lies a question engineers are seriously trying to solve: if dying spacecraft sometimes wake up, how do you design death? The answer of the age is design for demise: a modern satellite is planned so that it burns up completely upon entering the atmosphere, leaving no dangerous fragments to reach the ground. Add the market’s stable rule: a spacecraft that has done its work is moved at the end of its life, through a series of maneuvers, to a “graveyard” orbit or onto a ballistic trajectory that burns it over the ocean. The ISO 24113 standard on space debris and FCC rules for battery drainage are not bureaucratic ritual but a direct response to risk: once, “dying” machines turned into millions of fragments and flew above people’s heads for decades. In this context, the rise of the “zombie trend” looks strange: the smarter and more automated technology becomes, the more likely it is to wake along routes its designers never imagined — and the more carefully its death scenarios must be written. And there is nothing with which to silence zombies like AO-7: their receivers died long ago, commands from Earth cannot get through — so they keep flying for as long as ballistics allows.
«Рассвет» fits into this world without any mysticism at all: until its owner says a word, we know only what NORAD knows — an object ready to burn up a week ago is now steadily climbing. Of thirty-two spacecraft, two will burn up — perhaps. One of those two, which calculations said should burn up in the coming days, did not. The engineering moral, if one can be drawn from a single episode, is as old as the profession itself: never mark a machine down as dead until you have checked the circuit twice. The philosophy is truer than usual: hardware, unlike people, can have a second coming, even a third — and every time, it arrives not through prayer, but through wires.