News: Oh Russia, you used to do paranoia so much better

Mr. Conspiracy · Jan 12, 2012

Wow, they are certainly struggling to find bogeymen.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2104251,00.html?hpt=hp_t3

But the Cold War is over, Germany's been housebroken and there's less need than ever to see hostile foreigners lurking behind every bush. You wouldn't have known that this week this week, however, to listen to Vladimir Popovkin, the director of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.
It's been a bad couple of months for Roscosmos, ever since an ambitious Russian Mars probe was launched on Nov. 9, headed to the Martian moon Phobos to collect and return a sample of extraterrestrial rock and soil. The ship, named Phobos-Grunt (or Ground) fell a wee bit short of its target, never making it out of Earth orbit after an upper stage booster failed. Now, as all things stranded in low Earth orbit must, the probe is headed home, set to reenter the atmosphere and break apart sometime between Jan. 14 and 16. The best estimate so far is that the precise moment of impact will be 1:18 PM, Moscow time, on Jan. 15, and the precise place will be the Indian Ocean.

In announcing this news on Tuesday, however, Popovkin couldn't resist deflecting the blame for the mission's failure, suggesting — with an exquisite lack of subtlety — that the mission may have been sabotaged by another country (America, we're looking at you), using an antisatellite weapon. "We don't want to accuse anybody," Popovkin said, accusing somebody, "but there are very powerful devices that can influence spacecraft now." In case you were wondering, that's Russian for "I'm just sayin'."
OK, so what exactly is Popovkin's claim? It's true that when Russian spacecraft fail very early in their missions — just as they're getting their footing in orbit — the problem often occurs when the craft is flying over the Western hemisphere, where any imagined skeet-shooting from the U.S. would take place. "The frequent failure of our space launches," he told the newspaper Izvestia, "which occur at a time when they are flying over the part of the Earth not visible from Russia, where we do not see the spacecraft and do not receive telemetric information, are not clear to us."
Maybe, but they should be. It's a basic rule of orbital mechanics that if you want to adjust your flight path when you're on one side of the planet, you have to begin the maneuver while you're still on the other side. Accelerate when you're over the Western hemisphere and your altitude will increase by the time you're over the Eastern. Decelerate and you'll be flying lower half a revolution later. By definition, Russia's key early maneuvers in any flight must thus take place while they're flying through our orbital neighborhood — just as ours take place while we're flying through theirs.
None of that means we're responsible for the breakdowns — or that we'd even have the technical capability for such technological meddling. That didn't stop another Russian official, Nikolai Rodinov, who once oversaw the country's strategic early warning system, from suggesting that powerful electromagnetic impulses — a nicely vague but just-plausible-enough weapon — were to blame.
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