The "Black Knight" object photographed on STS-88

December 1998. Space Shuttle Endeavour carried the Unity node into orbit, where the Russian-built Zarya module was waiting. The crew's task was to join the two. Six people flew: commander Robert D. Cabana, pilot Frederick W. Sturckow, and mission specialists Nancy J. Currie, Jerry L. Ross, James H. Newman and Sergei K. Krikalev.

Unity had trunnion pins, stubby bars that locked it into the payload bay for launch. As bare metal they leaked heat. So on the spacewalks, the crew strapped insulating covers over them.

December 7, 1998. Ross and Newman spent 7 hours and 21 minutes outside. Loose hardware kept slipping away. "Houston, I lost a ... socket and a retractable," Ross radioed. Cabana watched it go. "It's floating about 20 feet above the nose of the orbiter, directly in front of us. It has very little rate on it."

Then, as later accounts tell it, came another call. "Jerry, one of the thermal covers got away from you." The cover was lost for good. Ross had done four previous spacewalks without losing an item. Afterwards he was blunt. "Don't do what I did!… I don't have the slightest idea what happened."

December 11, 1998. 20:16:41 GMT. Endeavour was 213 nautical miles above the South Atlantic, west of southern Africa. Below, it was night, and cloud covered most of the view. The shuttle was still in sunlight. A Hasselblad with a 250 mm lens caught a dark, irregular shape silhouetted against the Earth. Frame after frame, its outline twisted and changed. By frame 70, at 20:18:44, sunglint showed behind it.

Some accounts name Krikalev as the photographer. NASA catalogued the frames with a plain tag. "SPACE DEBRIS."

The Black Knight story was already old. It stitched together Tesla's 1899 Colorado Springs signals, radio echoes recorded by Jørgen Hals in Oslo in 1928, Donald Keyhoe's 1954 claim that the US Air Force had detected two satellites, and a "dark object" reported by Time in 1960. In 1973 Duncan Lunan read the echoes as a 13,000-year-old probe from Epsilon Boötis, then later retracted it. Online, the STS-88 frames became the legend's portrait. The Black Vault posted frame 65 as a case file on 6 March 2015. In May 2024 a TikTok clip carried the 13,000 years and Epsilon Boötis to a new audience.

James Oberg, a former NASA trajectory engineer who worked on STS-88, identified the shape as a trunnion pin thermal cover. NORAD tracked the object as catalogue 25570, filed as station debris. It re-entered on 14 December 1998. In Oberg's words, it "burned up when it fell out of orbit about a week after it was lost." No 13,000-year-old satellite could do that.

The shifting silhouette had an answer too. A 2015 video by NUA argued the object only seemed to change shape because it was turning as it fell away. Martina Redpath of the Armagh Planetarium called the legend "a jumble of completely unrelated stories." In 2024, Lead Stories rated the TikTok claim false.

Nobody says the photographs were faked. They are genuine NASA frames, and the argument has only ever been about what they show. Brian Dunning examined the legend on Skeptoid in 2013, yet it keeps returning. A lost insulating cover, tumbling in sunlight, became the face of the Black Knight.