A Chinese national has been arrested on suspicion of flying a drone to take photographs over a US Space Force base.
Federal police arrested Yinpiao Zhou on Monday after he was allegedly caught flying a drone over the Vandenberg Space Force Base, in California.
In a criminal complaint, the US Attorney’s Office said Mr Zhou flew a drone over the base and took photographs on Nov 30 – the same day it launched a rocket on behalf of the National Reconnaissance Office.
He has been accused of violating national defence aerospace, and of failing to register an aircraft as required under US law.
Police arrested Mr Zhou in San Francisco as he waited to board a flight back to China.
A court filing said he had a visa to live in the United States.
The incident was the latest in a series of unauthorized drone sightings above US air bases, including two in the UK last month.
The complaint against Mr Zhou, filed in California, says he admitted to installing software on his drone to evade both limits on the height the device could fly at and a virtual fence around the Vandenberg base.
The drone was allegedly in the air for 59 minutes and took photographs of SpaceX rocket pads and other sensitive areas.
The flight was picked up by the base’s security team, who traced Mr Zhou to the nearby Ocean Park, where he was standing with another man.
After initially hiding the drone in his coat, Mr Zhou then admitted he had flown it over the base and recorded the site from around a mile in the air, the complaint said.
He then told law enforcement officers that flying the drone, which is against federal law, was “probably not a good idea”.
According to the complaint, a search of his phone revealed he had looked up “Vandenberg Space Force Base Drone Rules” around a month earlier, and told another person on the Chinese messaging app WeChat that he had “hacked” the drone to fly higher than its default settings allowed.
The incident took place on the same day that a SpaceX rocket took off from the base with a “sensitive payload” for the National Reconnaissance Office, which is the federal intelligence agency that runs spy satellites.
