🚨🚨SCOOPLET!🚨🚨 China is expanding its mysterious, giant airfield in the middle of the desert. New (28 June) imagery from @Maxar shows a dozen or so buildings under construction at the site.
This airstrip is huge at 5km (3 mi). It's weird in several ways:
✅Its in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of an abandoned nuclear test site at Lop Nur.
✅It doesn't have normal aistrip stuff, like taxiways, aprons or control towers.
✅Did I mention it's GINORMOUSLY LONG?
Last year its believed that China landed a classified "space plane" at the site. That's in part because the runway JUST HAPPENED to align perfectly with the space plane's orbital path.
But other than that, the airstrip has been quiet. There's not a lot going on. Also not much in the way of accommodation. These modular buildings at the south end of the runway are only place to stay for at least 40km in any direction....
Until now! Between August 2020 and now, a whole bunch of new structures have popped up near the central hanger in the middle of the site (Left image: Feb 2020, Right image June 28 2021).
It's not entirely clear what these structures are for, but they're fairly big.
It's puzzling, says @planet4589 because if this facility really is just used for retrieving the space plane every now and again, you wouldn't need these kind of permanent structures:
"This seems to be something that is more than just, 'We're coming here for the weekend.'"
Also, this site, in a desert 100s of miles from any decent sized city, isn't really somewhere you'd want to hang out. Though I would note it's probably a DRY heat.
So what's going on? Well, says @nktpnd, a giant runway in the middle of the desert can be used for other things... testing secret aircraft and drones, for example.
"This does look like it could be a Chinese Area 51," he says.
Ok, but seriously. There's a lot we still don't know about the site, and a lot we may never know. But this does seem significant.
"I think we're observing a pretty important facility for China's military space activities, that appears to be growing," Panda says.
For a little more background on what makes the Lop Nur airfield so unusual, check out this thread from the space plane landing in 2020:
And as a final coda for the OSINT geeks, I'd just note that the beginnings of this construction was actually visible when the space plane landed in September of 2020! It just wasn't obvious yet what was happening at the site.
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So first off, where did this came come from? As far as I can tell, it was Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty's Russian Service, I think?). They posted it on their Telegram channel earlier today and did a brief write-up here:
There's not a lot of detail about either the image or the analysis. But the original image came from @planet and was taken at 10:51 AM (07:51 GMT) on 5 July.
Here it is, and sure enough there are the white things on the roof....
NEW: @TBowmanNPR has confirmed with a "U.S. Official" that an American surveillance satellite saw an explosion at the Kakhovka dam.
The official said that the image did not indicate who was responsible or whether the blast occurred above or below water.
Although the official did not confirm the exact system used, I think that a SBIRS sat is most likely.
SBIRS stands for the Space-Based Infrared System. It is a vital part of the U.S. early-warning network designed to watch for a ICBM missile launch anywhere on earth.
SBIRS has two parts:
"SBIRS High" -- a constellation of geostationary satellites that watch the entire globe all at once.
"SBIRS Low" -- a group of lower-orbiting satellites that provide higher resolution imagery.
The exact capabilities of these sats remain classified but...
The Kakhovka Dam appears to be gone. This is going to have far-reaching consequences for weeks and months to come.
Here are some very early thoughts. (video via Ukrhydroenergo Telegram)🧵
First, a little background on what had been going on. Water levels plummeted in February and then surged in May to record highs.
I think this is because Russia was not managing the dam. They left some sluice gates open on their side, which caused water levels to drop at the start of winter...
But after the spring rains, the gates weren't letting enough water through...