{"id":186909,"date":"2013-08-27T18:40:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-27T23:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/08\/27\/who-knew-that-the-chinese-were-austin-powers-fans\/"},"modified":"2013-08-27T18:40:00","modified_gmt":"2013-08-27T23:40:00","slug":"who-knew-that-the-chinese-were-austin-powers-fans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/08\/27\/who-knew-that-the-chinese-were-austin-powers-fans\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Knew that the Chinese Were Austin Powers Fans?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/Ap9fxXc.jpg\" style=\"cursor: pointer; float: right; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px;\" width=\"200\" \/>Because those in the know are saying that <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/war-is-boring\/630a858923ec\">China\u2019s latest satellite launch was testing a claw using anti-satellite weapon<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">On July 29, a Chinese Long March-4C rocket blasted into space from the northern Taiyuan Space Center carrying three secretive, experimental satellites. Not really all that unusual by itself\u200a\u2014\u200aa robotic arm reportedly on one of the satellites could be involved in testing for Beijing\u2019s far-off space station program.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">But once they were in orbit, the satellites began acting very, very strangely.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">More precisely, one of the satellites, known as SY-7, was moving all over the place and was appearing to make close-in rendezvous\u2019s with other satellites. It was so strange, space analysts wondered whether China was testing a new kind of space weapon\u200a\u2014\u200aone that could intercept other satellites and more or less claw them to death.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">It\u2019s not as crazy as it sounds. The U.S. has experimented with anti-satellite weapons, and is even researching how to cannibalize satellites in orbit. China has even blown up one of its own satellites with a missile. That caused an international outcry considering the giant cloud of debris which has come close to imperiling space travel for a century.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">But a claw might be more discreet.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and author of the sat-tracking newsletter Jonathan\u2019s Space Report, reported that at least one of the satellites wields a robot-manipulator arm developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">Could it be an anti-satellite weapon? This would be a satellite capable of impacting with other satellites, destroying them with sheer kinetic force, or detonating explosive charges nearby like a satellite suicide bomber. The manipulator arm could also be potentially used as a weapon, grabbing away and plucking bits off an enemy satellite like it was an insect.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is so f%$#ing weird.<\/p>\n<p>It reads like something out of <i>The Onion<\/i> or one of the Austin Powers movie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because those in the know are saying that China\u2019s latest satellite launch was testing a claw using anti-satellite weapon: On July 29, a Chinese Long March-4C rocket blasted into space from the northern Taiyuan Space Center carrying three secretive, experimental satellites. Not really all that unusual by itself\u200a\u2014\u200aa robotic arm reportedly on one of the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1170,1037,1025,1015],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-space","category-technology","category-weird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186909"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}