China’s launch of their new Shenzhou 7 was launched this morning, so successful that a full article describing its success was written and posted online hours before anything actually happened, including descriptions and fake dialogue.
"After this order, signal lights all were switched on, various data show up on rows of screens, hundreds of technicians staring at the screens, without missing any slightest changes …
‘One minute to go!’
‘Changjiang No.1 found the target!’…
"The firm voice of the controller broke the silence of the whole ship. Now, the target is captured 12 seconds ahead of the predicted time …
‘The air pressure in the cabin is normal!’
“Ten minutes later, the ship disappears below the horizon. Warm clapping and excited cheering breaks the night sky, echoing across the silent Pacific Ocean.”
How much of it was real and how much of it was CGI? Nah, I don’t trust China enough to credit them for any of their so-called ‘accomplishments’.
I hope that the melamine issue that’s currently resulting in the potentially fatal poisoning of hundreds of thousands of babies continues to get more play compared to some worthless rocket launch that America and Russia managed to accomplish almost a half of a century ago with relatively primitive technology and performs on a routine basis these days.
Yeah, nobody’s seriously expecting that they’re going to fake the entire thing. This just makes it clear that they were going to put a “perfect success” spin on it no matter what actually happened.
Most countries don’t bother with their own programs because they can just piggyback onto NASA and the Russian programs to accomplish their own scientific goals.
It is a pretty big deal though, there’s no denying it. It’s China’s way of saying that they don’t need American support to accomplish things like these, though I’m sure Russia (and Europe) contributed to their project, so it’s not as if they’re entirely independent.
I just think it’s lame that they’d try to spin it as a perfect success, and it’s especially jarring with the whole ‘12 seconds ahead of predicted time’ dialogue. WTF?
(Even if in reality they’d be frantically going “How the hell were our readings and calculations off by 12 seconds?! We could have failed to get the seals activated properly!”…)
