Richard Hoagland's arrow hits the barn

James Concannon was awake enough to hear last night's Coast to Coast AM news segment, and reports this:

        Richard Hoagland's claims very often amount to shooting an arrow into the side of a barn, then running up and painting a target around it. There cannot be any more blatant example of this than last night's performance.

        George Noory reported AvWeek's story that the US Strategic Command has removed links from a web page tracking the final orbit of Phobos-Grunt, which re-entered at 17:45 UTC last Sunday, exactly as expected. He then introduced Hoagland the "science adviser" with the words "I gotta hand it to you Richard, you've been saying for a long time that this is a strange situation." Hoagland smugly replied "Science is nothing if it's not prediction, George" as if this was another brilliant example of his successful analysis. The unexplained action by StratCom allowed Hoagland to claim that the spacecraft had set off on a secret mission to rendezvous with the asteroid YU₅₅.

        The truth is 180 degrees from a successful prediction. Hoagland never predicted that StratCom would fudge re-entry data. What he predicted, on November 28th, was that Phobos-Grunt would depart on its secret mission the next day, because the numerology of 11/29/11 was favorable. That prediction was entirely wrong.

        On October 21st he said that the rotation period of the asteroid was 19.5 hours. That was wrong. He said it was perfectly spherical. That was wrong too. Richard Hoagland is in no position to claim any success, let alone brilliance, at reporting YU_55.

The inexorable logic of celestial mechanics

        Now look, if by chance there are any Hoagland disciples reading this, I beseech you in the bowels of Christ to think it possible your guru may be wrong (as somebody once said, more or less.)

        In the first place, a spacecraft designed for a sample return from a 22 km moon would be ineffective for examination of a 400m asteroid, and vice versa. Phobos-Grunt could not possibly have been designed for a rendezvous with YU₅₅ without a thousand engineers going "wtf?" or the Russian equivalent.

        In the second place, could you please ask your leader why, if some sinister cabal wished to send a spacecraft to say hello to the asteroid, they would allow a close pass within 325,000 km to elapse without taking action, instead waiting until it was half way to Mars before setting out in pursuit?

        The producers of Coast to Coast, of course, don't think of these things. George Noory wouldn't care about the truth even if he could discern it. But that doesn't excuse the rest of us from the responsibility to respect the laws of physics.

--James Concannon