I think you might be right on this one. Recent US spy satellites such as PAN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-207 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-207) have

I think you might be right on this one. Recent US spy satellites such as PAN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-207 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-207) have started using much, much more aggressive manoeuvring strategies in order to do line-of-site microwave dish spying and spying on commercial sats. This is unusual for "geostationary" satellites, as it wastes precious fuel. If there is no restriction on the amount of fuel used, they can stay up a lot longer than a normal satellite could.