A military spacecraft launched 56 years ago was moved from its orbit – and nobody is quite sure who did it, or why. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

In 1969 the UK launched Skynet-1A, a military communications satellite placed in orbit above the east coast of Africa in order to relay information to British armed forces. It stopped working due to hardware issues around 18 months after it started operating, and the spacecraft was left to the laws of physics to orbit the Earth – it is now the oldest UK spacecraft still in space.

It's a good idea to check on defunct satellites, to make sure the space debris is not on course to collide with any working satellites or populated areas of the Earth below. In the 1970s, when

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