10 Zombie Satellites That Came Back From the Dead

NASA wrote off the IMAGE satellite in 2005. Twelve years later an amateur in British Columbia, hunting for a classified spysat, found it still transmitting. That's not even the strangest comeback on this list.

In April 2010 a communications satellite called Galaxy 15 stopped taking commands and wandered off down the geostationary arc, transponders blasting at full power. The trade press needed a word for a spacecraft that is dead to its operators but very much alive on the radio spectrum, and it settled on “zombie satellite.” The name stuck, and Galaxy 15 turned out to have a lot of company.

A zombie satellite is a spacecraft that went silent or uncontrolled, got written off, and later turned out to be alive. Sometimes engineers pull off a genuine rescue. Sometimes the satellite fixes itself through sheer electrical luck. And sometimes it was never quite dead in the first place, muttering away on a forgotten frequency until someone with a backyard antenna thought to listen.

The people who find these things are mostly not space agencies. They are amateur radio operators and independent trackers, and one of them, Scott Tilley of British Columbia, appears on this list twice. Governments spend billions tracking objects in orbit; the zombies keep getting found by people doing it for fun.

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