I was so fucking wrong about Ukraine. I like to think I can distinguish myself somewhat by owning how wrong I was and applying the lesson of being really fucking wrong to everything else I hold true. But I'm just a dude with a modem, man. There's plenty of wrong to go 'round on Ukraine. The fact that the CIA got it right is... I mean, that's a new perspective, too. Day before yesterday a blog nobody reads ran an absolutely bugshit photo. Shitty resolution. No source. NOBODY believed it. Then 36 hours later, the Pentagon dropped that shit in 4k. The Ockham's Razor on the situation is the U-2 guys gave their selfie to their favorite blog the day before the Pentagon did because it was fun to do that. Matt Stoller observed that Biden's state of the Union was the first one since 1979 to contain the word "antitrust." I dunno. For the first time in a long, long time I'm starting to feel like maybe the government isn't a total dumpster fire.
Yup, I saw the grainy version on /r/aviation a few days ago and thought "yeah, right". The photo is probably a frame pulled from a vid, to score the frame shadow projected onto the balloon like that. Also shows how well the solar panels' orientation was maintained. Surface normal vector pointed straight towards the plane/sun.
Buddy of mine pointed out that "coming around" in a U-2 is more challenging than most as the difference between "wings come off" and "stall" is about 10 knots. Which means you have about about 2% variation above and below cruise in a straight line... and less than that in a turn, as one wingtip is going more than cruise and the other is going less. I pointed out that a GoPro Hero 4 gives you a 4k image at 120Hz. A U-2 is 63 feet long and cruise speed is 630 ft/sec; there's either about a fifth of a second in which to get that one good shot, or you rip it at 4k and you have a dozen or more shots with 'muricashadow flying proud on that balloon. And that's a GoPro. I can only imagine what purposeful cameras that thing has on it. When Frank Powers got shot down it was taking pictures of the ground with 20cm resolution from that high up.