Damn, I thought this news article was lying to me.
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Jokes aside - There are also American spy satellites which overfly Huludao on a daily (if not almost daily) basis would've caught the 095 as soon as it was launched, given that it'd be spending many weeks doing fitting-out and mooring trials right in the open before conducting sea trials.
The only "surprise" element for us PLA fanbois would be when the OSINTers managed to get satellite imageries of the 095 and posted about them on Twitter or Naval News (ahem) - As in, the "surprise" would have significant latency, compared to, say, the first flights of the J-36 and J-XDS/50.
So I think that it's definitely something else.
Given the size of submarines and the number of satellites in general, there's probably hourly imagery available of Huludao these days.



