Who Knew that the Chinese Were Austin Powers Fans?

Because those in the know are saying that China’s 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 — a robotic arm reportedly on one of the satellites could be involved in testing for Beijing’s far-off space station program.

But once they were in orbit, the satellites began acting very, very strangely.

More precisely, one of the satellites, known as SY-7, was moving all over the place and was appearing to make close-in rendezvous’s with other satellites. It was so strange, space analysts wondered whether China was testing a new kind of space weapon — one that could intercept other satellites and more or less claw them to death.

It’s 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.

But a claw might be more discreet.

………

Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and author of the sat-tracking newsletter Jonathan’s Space Report, reported that at least one of the satellites wields a robot-manipulator arm developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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.

This is so f%$#ing weird.

It reads like something out of The Onion or one of the Austin Powers movie.