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PLANE DOWN! WHERE ARE ALL THE SPY SATELLITES?

By Dave Duggan

Malaysian Flight 370, MH370, airline picture in flight - HeadStuff.orgPLANE DOWN! WHERE ARE ALL THE SPY SATELLITES?

 

Satellite’s gone up to the skies

Things like that drive me out of my mind

 

The tragic loss of life following the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370 raises many questions, the most simple phrasing of which is: what happened?

 

A more complex question is: why weren’t the plane’s movements picked up by the spy satellites that orbit the planet?

 

The answer is obvious. There are no spy satellites orbiting the planet.

GPS satellite in orbit around the earth planet, no spy satellite - HeadStuff.org

 

Using faint, hourly satellite signals gathered by British firm Inmarsat plc and radar data from early in its flight, investigators have only estimates of the speed the aircraft was travelling and no certainty of its altitude, Mr Houston said. Satellite imagery of the new search area had not given “anything better than low confidence of finding anything”, said Mick Kinley, another search official in Perth.

 

Would it were the case that Flight MH 370 went off course in a major Hollywood blockbuster rather than in the skies over The South China Sea! But things aren’t straightforward, not even in a film.

 

All the Hollywood spy films we watch are now shown to be utterly fantastical, even false. There are no spy satellites that can pin-point, with razor-sharp accuracy, the location of a desperate terrorist intent on blowing up The President, just in time for a government agent to swoop and defeat the enemy. Or just in time for a drone weapon to identify and eliminate (i.e. kill) the target (i.e. person).

 

RESEARCH TECH #2

Sir. I’ve got a code here from NSA —

they’re not gonna give us Keyhole

satellite clearance unless we have

sign-off from upstairs.

 

Who can give this clearance? And why wasn’t it given to Research Tech #2? Or to Malaysia Airlines?

 

Who signs off?

 

If you wanted, you could pick your own secret missions. As I do. Name it, name it. Destabilize a multinational by manipulating stocks. Bip. Easy. Interrupt transmissions from a spy satellite over Kabul… done. Hmm. Rig an election in Uganda. All to the highest bidder.

Or a gas explosion in London.

Mm-hm. Just point and click.

Well, everybody needs a hobby.

So what’s yours?

Resurrection.

 

Tragically, resurrection is not possible for the people on MH 370. There is no ‘point and click’ technology that will bring them back. No app that will salve the grief of the families who have lost loved ones.

Roger Moore as James Bond in Moonraker, spy in space, outer space, spy satellite - HeadStuff.org

No ace-screenwriter who can conjure up the lost plane and locate, using imagination and satellite wizardry, the handful of sterling survivors of flight MH 370, clinging to translucent coral that curls from an atoll in an azure ocean.

 

This tragedy proves there are no spy satellites. We are alone, with only the stars to light us.

 

I saw two shooting stars last night

I wished on them but they were only satellites

Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?

I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care

 

Or alternatively, the families of the dead have not got clearance to use spy satellite data. They do not have sign-off.

 

From upstairs. Where the satellites orbit.

 

Dave Duggan 34 posts 0 comments

Dave Duggan is a novelist and dramatist born in London, raised in Waterford, and living in Derry. He is the author of the novels The Greening of Larry Mahon (Guildhall Press, 2004), A Sudden Sun (Guildhall Press, 2012), and Makaronik (Cló Iar Chonnacht, 2018). His film work includes the Oscar nominated Dance Lexie Dance (Raw Nerve Productions, 1996). Dave’s theatre work has played throughout Ireland and in Edinburgh, Liverpool, New York and Afghanistan. His fourth novel, Oak and Stone, is published by Merdog Books (2019).