Everything You Know Is Wrong

Russian Kobalt-M Spy Satellite

Some people spotted a fireball in the sky last week over the Southwestern USA. They put their heads together and concluded that it was a Russian spy satellite. Russia says no, their satellite came down safely in Kazakhstan a few hours earlier. Okay, so maybe it was part of the satellite that the Russians didn't care about, in which case both versions of the story could be sort of true. But that's not what's interesting.

Last Week's Fireball Observations

     The satellite came down safely. Who bothers to recover an unmanned satellite? That is a whole lot of effort and expense for something that isn't carrying any passengers. What could this satellite be carrying that would be worth that kind of effort? Would you believe film? Can you believe the Russians are still using spy satellites that use regular film cameras to record images? The USA used to do that back during the cold war, but we moved to digital imaging a long time ago. The Russians are still doing it, or at least they were last week. I guess they do have digital spy satellites now. They just put this one up to stand in for one of their digital ones that crapped out.

The part that bothers me about this is that a film based system has got to be a zillion times more expensive per image than a digital one, and here the whole world is crying about how broke we are and we haven't got enough money for teachers or schools or food or roads or just about anything and we need to raise taxes to pay for all this stuff, but we can't raise taxes because everyone is too broke to pay any more taxes. And here's Russia, broke as of a couple of years ago, blowing a kazillion dollars on an obsolete spy satellite.

So all those people who are in charge are a bunch of lying sacks of shit. On the other hand, maybe that's what it takes to keep the lid on things. Or maybe nobody has a better idea.

P.S. I first encountered the title phrase when I was around 20 years old, and it really resonated with me. The Vietnam War was in full swing and I had just started noticing that what was going on in the world did not quite jibe with what I had been taught in school. Now I've got kids of my own going through this same thing, which reminded me of this phrase, which prompted me to try and find out where it came from. Firesign Theater is the answer. Never cared much for their recordings, but this title really struck me.

More about the Kobalt-M spy satellite here.

Update March 2017 replaced dead links.