And alpha-5 is an ugly hack. Better to force the code rewrites to support full 9-digit numbers, painful though that would be.

Yes, at this point it doesn't seem worth doing things to buy another few weeks before the 70K boundary

The second stage was already deorbited by then. Don't know what this object would be.

Sorry, that should have read 173*W* 5N

Good point. Plausible.

Likely an UR-100NU 15A35-71 test, since that's all that has flown from there in recent years

INSAT-3B was retired in Feb 2011

Nope

Wow, it seems like only yesterday that Kola and Karelia broke off from it...

This long standing division between "real NASA" and "contractors" is a pet peeve of mine. If you're going to save on benefits money by not hiring people as civil servants, at least have the system treat them with more respect.

I take it back, Mike Collins grew one on Apollo 11

Yes, I think Garriott was the first.