In the 1971 film The Andromeda Strain, the military satellite that returns to Earth is called Scoop VII.
Scoop VII is part of a secret military space program designed to collect material from beyond Earth’s atmosphere. It crashes near the fictional town of Piedmont, New Mexico, where nearly every resident is found dead. A recovery team retrieves the satellite, unknowingly bringing back a microscopic extraterrestrial organism.
The organism becomes known as the Andromeda strain. Scientists at the Wildfire laboratory, a highly secure underground facility, investigate it while trying to determine why two people—a drunken older man and an infant—survived the town’s mass death. Their investigation becomes a race against a biological threat that behaves unlike ordinary earthly pathogens.
Scoop VII is easy to confuse with the names of other satellites or with Project Scoop itself. Project Scoop is the broader military operation; Scoop VII is the specific satellite involved in the film’s crisis. The movie was adapted from Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel and directed by Robert Wise.