Why are there some NORAD catalog IDs larger than 80000 in space-track?

Question

I was trying to find the international designator for the Starlink-2 constellation launch. Not finding anything in Celestrak I looked in Space-Track.

The following space-track.org query builder setup generated the following query.

https://www.space-track.org/basicspacedata/query/class/tle_latest/NORAD_CAT_ID/%3E44700/orderby/NORAD_CAT_ID%20asc/limit/5000/format/tle/emptyresult/show

It gives me the latest TLEs for objects with NORAD catalogue IDs above 44700, sorted by international designator. The series goes up to 44712 then jumps to 81014 and lists several thousand more designators, ending at 89496.

Many of them above 80000 have no epochs, but some have epoch years of 1983 or 1970.

Question: Why are there some NORAD catalog IDs larger than 80000 in space-track?

---

Here are a few snippets of a few columns. Space-Track requires registration to access data. To register for (the free) access see this answer.

Answer 1

These are so called "Analyst" objects:

Analyst objects are on-orbit objects that are tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN) with insufficient fidelity for publication in the public satellite catalog (SATCAT). The lack of fidelity may be due to infrequent tracking, cross-tagging (observation association with closely-spaced objects), or inability to associate the object with a known launch. Today there are approximately 17,000 on-orbit objects in the public SATCAT and approximately 6,000 on-orbit analyst objects for a total of 23,000. ... The analyst range, which is denoted by a satellite number from 80,000-89,999, is used like an analytical sandbox

Source: Space Track documentation

Celestrak keeps a nice list of all Analyst objects and the age of their TLE's here.

And, of course, for all things TLE I strongly suggest following T.S. Kelso on Twitter