Quick, Hide the Tanks!

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When they divvy up the $27 billion intelligence budget each year, it's not the well-known CIA that takes the lion's share. The real haul goes to an obscure agency called the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and deploys the country's high-tech, supersecret spy satellites. For the billions of dollars it receives, the NRO produces portfolios of invaluable high-resolution pictures (which can indeed read license plates from space). The photos give the U.S. a jump on adversaries as diverse as North Korean missile builders and South American drug lords.

But these secret spies in the sky have a problem: they're not so secret. Too heavy to lift without a fiery rocket plume and too bright to avoid being seen from Earth, the NRO's birds are hard to hide. And an international band of amateur astronomers has determined to find, track and webcast the location of all the members of this orbital fleet for anyone who cares to look--including such less than friendly sorts as Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il.

This amateur network has run down most of the satellites--spy or commercial--that have ever been launched and are still in orbit, including what appeared to be a stealth satellite the U.S. deployed in 1990. All this info has been channeled to a website playfully called Heavens-Above.com that shows where the orbital snoops are every hour of the day or night--something that has some in U.S. intelligence circles understandably livid.

"The fact that you can know readily where U.S. satellites are at any time means that if you're India or North Korea, it's that much easier to hide what you're doing," says an outraged senior intelligence official. If he had his way, some of the satellite trackers would be prosecuted.

One of the most talented is Ted Molczan, 47, an energy-conservation consultant from Toronto, who took up satellite tracking as a kid. "I saw my first satellite in the early '60s and was just absolutely fascinated," says Molczan. Joining like-minded enthusiasts, he and his pals began observing U.S. satellite launches just as a famous group of schoolkids at England's Kettering School tracked Soviet ones, finding some even before they were officially revealed.

It takes patience to spot the fleeting satellites skimming across the night sky plus a certain skill at celestial mechanics to divine an orbit from these observations. But Molczan and his Web cronies have become highly proficient. Russell Eberst of Edinburgh, Scotland, has made some 170,000 orbital observations over a storied career. Mike McCants of Austin, Texas, has spent hours on end scanning the sky for lost satellites. Especially gifted is Jonathan McDowell, a researcher at the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astro-physics who can process orbital data like a super-computer.

Molczan insists that spying on the spies isn't really hard. For starters, he says, the U.S. telegraphs its intentions by warning mariners and aviators before every space launch. Using spherical trigonometry, the trackers plot a potential orbit and notify other amateurs worldwide where to look. That's how Eberst and others track the famous 1990 stealth satellite, despite decoys deployed to distract observers. They lost that satellite after it maneuvered unexpectedly a few months later, but even that much tracking has some spooks steamed.