21 thoughts on “Was X-37 Spying On The Chinese Space Station?”

  3. This is the case when you read a news story and your own education tells you that the writer doesn’t know what he’s reporting on. Then you tell yourself that this is the rule and not the exception on everything in the news.

    1. “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
      In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
      ― Michael Crichton

  6. The wrong longitude of the ascending node. He should’ve given it a wee bit more thought. His deduction was like guessing that two submarines were at the same depth, ventured to the same latitudes, and were traveling at the same speed and heading, but he concluded that one must be shadowing the other before he determined if they were even sailing in the same ocean.

    Longitude. It matters.

    1. The wrong longitude of the ascending node.

      Same thing. Longitude of the ascending node is the same as right ascension of the ascending node, but I was exercising some poetic license to try and make the pun work. Wrong ascension of the ascending node might have worked better. Anyway, if you have to explain a pun, it failed…

      As an aside, why is it called right ascension? That seems a more appropriate name for what is actually called declination.

      1. Our orbital terms are all scewed up anyway, which is further evidence that we’re not really a space faring society yet. “Longitude of the ascending node”? Periaspsis? Eccentricity? “True anomally?” Those are terms from book-bound academics, ill suited to high-velocity precision navigation. Just as you’d conclude that a culture whose term for “blacksmith” is “man who beats the metal that is not copper or gold and is really hard,” hadn’t entered the iron age, “longitude of the ascending node” says we’re not really in the space age.

        Our terms should be words that would let us say things like “Set your eck to 0.97 with an apex at 153.2 and a buzz at 149, and make your cross at 123 degrees.”

        It might be fun to suggest better terms for orbital elements, and terms that aren’t just acronyms, as if we’d been doing this for centuries.

        1. Heh, that’s an interesting point. On the other hand it is nice to think that you are standing in a >2500 year tradition of atronomers, sailors, geometers etc. On a slightly related note, I think it’s ironic to realise that the ancients had all the knowledge of conics they needed to understand planetary motion. Plato would have been both thrilled to learn that the intellect could pierce the veil that hid the regularity behind the deviations from a circular model and shocked that the resulting idealised orbits were ellipses instead of the much more symmetrical circles.

  7. Of course, the X-37B has wings, giving it the (theoretical) ability to change its inclination by means of aerodynamic maneuvering. I’d be surprised if this capability hasn’t been used at some point.

  8. It’s worth noting that the article jumped to the conclusion that X-37 was spying on Tiangong 1, even though a different conclusion that the Tiangong 1 was spying on the X-37 would have fit better (like a square peg fits better than a triangular peg in a round hole).

  9. Wow. I’ve got a few of Baker’s books in my collection, assuming it’s the same guy.

    I wish that subtleties of orbital mechanics only confused journalists.

  10. The following is not a cheap shot — it just made me chuckle, and it is another case where having a little physics knowledge is worse than having none at all. At last night’s debate, Governor Perry warned that Iran was going to enter Iraq at “literally the speed of light”. If he meant “just a hair under the speed of light”, well, that could be a bad day.

    Here’s the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=I5qZ9GrBf4w

    1. Bob,
      It’s not like he claiming to have been to all 57 states, doesn’t know how to pronounced “corpsman”, or wants to learn the Austrian language, so yeah, it’s a cheap shot.

      P.S. I’m not a Perry fan in the least, but I do love the hypocrisy of the nit pick.

    2. For symmetry, you really need to “nitpick” Obama in a physics-related comment. I couldn’t find a suitable one, but perhaps the VP can stand in for the President. Biden often likes to use physics analogies to explain what an inflection point is, so that he can claim we are at an inflection point in our history. To see dozens of examples, you can Google inflection point and Biden. Sometimes he does an ok job, sometimes not so much.

      “We are at a inflection point in world history, a point at which my physics professor used to say, an inflection point is when you sit behind the wheel of an automobile that is going 60 miles an hour and abruptly you turn it five degrees in one direction. It means you will never be back on the path you once were. It is impossible to return to that path.”

      1. Care to point to any examples of Obama using a physics-based analogy correctly or at all? If he doesn’t use them, then he won’t get them wrong.

        I’m still looking for evidence of Obama being intelligent, much less of his alleged brilliance as claimed.

    3. I think he meant that they would return quickly not literally the speed of light. Sometimes people make analogies like that.

      Short of a full on invasion or Al Sadr starting a civil war, I don’t think our troops are needed to defend Iraq from Iran.

      1. His use of the word “literally” undermined the analogy. But it didn’t literally undermine it.

        While I don’t know what it would mean to say that Iran was traveling at the speed of light, the thought of the entire country of Iran traveling near the speed of light as it entered Iraq was sort of interesting.

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