We are not talking about stealth vehicles.
[0] https://x.com/hwtnv/status/2031326840519041114 [1] https://sentiwiki.copernicus.eu/__attachments/1672913/Revisi...
I feel like there must be people at NRO whi are dedicated to sub tracking via satellite.
Aircraft carriers sail from home ports and are frequently visible to all. The Charles de Gaulle was previously in Denmark for instance, then obviously everyone can also see you crossing the English Channel and Straight of Gibraltar.
So from there it is only a matter of keeping an eye on it for anyone with satellites. So obviously all the "big guys" know where the other guys' capital ships are.
Not all of them.
(of all "national security" reasons these is one of more reasonable ones)
https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/
Doesn't matter whether Estonia, Honduras, Laos, and Luxembourg can track their carrier, or not.
EDIT: In confined waters (like the Mediterranean), many more countries could track the carrier if they cared to. Even back in the 1950's, the Soviets got quite adept at loading "fishing boats" with electronic equipment, then trailing behind US Navy carrier groups.
I just ran some googled numbers over my envelope, and I get that the Mediterranean sea (great circle distance between Gibraltar and Beirut is 2300mi) is about 14000x larger than the bow-to-stern length (858') of the carrier.
That's... not that terribly difficult as an imaging problem. Just a very tractable number of well-resolved 12k phone camera images would be able to bullseye it.
Obviously there are technical problems to be solved, like how to get the phones into the stratosphere on a regular basis for coverage, and the annoyance of "clouds" blocking the view. So it's not a DIY project.
But it seems eminently doable to me. The barriers in place are definitely not that the "empty space is just too big". The globe is kinda small these days.
That's why satellites use radars and scientific instrumentation magnetometers to find stuff like ships or even subs underwater.
Identifying a ship is harder, but not insurmountable. In particular, large ships like aircraft carriers tend to have very identifiable radar signatures if your resolution is high enough.
Most naval vessels move in groups/squadrons. Carriers basically always travel with a "carrier strike group"/CSG of a dozen other ships and destroyers often travel in "destroyer squadrons"/DESRONs. So any time you see a cluster of hits, just by the relative responses of each hit you can narrow down and guess the entire CSG/DESRON in one go and then work out which responses map to which ship in the CSG/DESRON once you have a good idea of which group you are looking at.
This is especially true because ships even within the same class have varying ages, different block numbers, and differing retrofits. So each one has a unique signature to it.
But also if you aren't completely certain you can always come back with a second high resolution pass and then it's trivial to identify each ship just visually.
EDIT: the sibling comment already provided a high quality answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47458766
Just do a youtube search and you'll find plenty of talking head explainer videos. Ignore the talking head and just look at the imagery and data they share.
Consider shooting a ray at the ocean at an oblique angle from a satellite: it bounces off and scatters away from you. Hardly any of the energy scatters back towards you.
Now, put a ship there. The ray bounces off the surface of the ocean and scatters up into the side of the ship, and from geometry, it's going to bounce off the ship and come straight back towards its original source. You get tons of energy coming back at you.
A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner reflector, which is a very good target for a radar.
> I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor?
That's one approach, there are so-called "tip and cue" concepts that do exactly this: a lead satellite will operate in a wide swath mode to detect targets, and then feed them back to a chase satellite which is operating in a high resolution spotlight mode to collect detailed radar images of the target for classification and identification.
However, aircraft carriers are big, so I don't think you'd even need to do the followup spotlight mode for identification. As an example, RADARSAT-2 does 35 meter resolution at a 450 km swath for its ship detection mode. That's plenty to be able to detect and identify an aircraft carrier, and that's a 20 year old civilian mission with public documentation, not a cutting edge military surveillance system. There are concepts for multi-aperture systems that can hit resolutions of less than ten meters at 500 km swath width using digital beamforming, like Germany's HRWS concept.
tl;dr: Radar works very well for this.
This is why the Zumwalt and other low observable designs are going back to roughly tumblehome hulls:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#/media...
.jpg){kind=link}
If only it could actually do anything. I genuinely don't understand how we refused to retrofit any weapon system to the gun mounts. We have 5inch guns. They aren't the magic cannon it was designed for but do they really not fit? Apparently we are now putting hypersonic missiles in those mounts instead.
Can't exactly make a Carrier that shape though.
They're putting hypersonics on it because they've got 3 hulls and might as well get some value out of them, but not because it's what you'd design for from scratch.
The Zumwalt program was dumb from day 1. It was driven by elderly people on the congressional arms committees that have romantic notions of battleships blasting it out.
The reality is since the development of anti ship missiles, sitting off the coast and plinking at someone is suicidal, even if you have stealth shaping and uber guns of some sort.
It was a DoA mission concept.
I mean fuck, I can pretty easily find the strait of hormuz on the map, pretty sure intelligence agencies can too and just look there for the carrier. If I can't find the carrier there, then I can plot the course between France and hormuz and do a brute force search over that course taking into account such a ship's relative velocity, since it's not like the carrier is gonna zig-zag through south america and the north pole on its way there to avoid detection. Is what I'm saying something sci-fi?
Seems to have come as a shock to the US government.
They probably lack the ability to figure out which specialists are on board.
Or does getting told by Russia count?
Now that's not realtime because I'm telling you after the fact. But if you were paid to do it, of course, then you'd spend some money on an actual account on this and similar services, which would get you many more filters and much more precise data.
Turning off AIS while allowing civilian traffic is incredibly risky, and creating a huge no-fly zone in the Med is politically tricky.
[0]: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/16/americas/venezuela-near-c...
It was patrolling ~100km below Cyprus's main southern city.
Move the timeline to yesterday, find a non-Boeing military plane in that zone, enable flight traces and keep trying planes until you see an ovoidal pattern circling around "nothing"... but that nothingness moves over time.m; that's the ship.
No need to go that far. Macron did press conferences in Cyprus and on the Charles de Gaulle. You just need a passing glance at the headlines of a French newspaper. Or any decent international news channel (granted, that’s a bit tricky in the US).