🚨🚨SCOOPLET!🚨🚨 China is expanding its mysterious, giant airfield in the middle of the desert. New (28 June) imagery from @Maxar shows a dozen or so buildings under construction at the site.
This airstrip is huge at 5km (3 mi). It's weird in several ways:
✅Its in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of an abandoned nuclear test site at Lop Nur.
✅It doesn't have normal aistrip stuff, like taxiways, aprons or control towers.
✅Did I mention it's GINORMOUSLY LONG?
Last year its believed that China landed a classified "space plane" at the site. That's in part because the runway JUST HAPPENED to align perfectly with the space plane's orbital path.
But other than that, the airstrip has been quiet. There's not a lot going on. Also not much in the way of accommodation. These modular buildings at the south end of the runway are only place to stay for at least 40km in any direction....
Until now! Between August 2020 and now, a whole bunch of new structures have popped up near the central hanger in the middle of the site (Left image: Feb 2020, Right image June 28 2021).
It's not entirely clear what these structures are for, but they're fairly big.
It's puzzling, says @planet4589 because if this facility really is just used for retrieving the space plane every now and again, you wouldn't need these kind of permanent structures:
"This seems to be something that is more than just, 'We're coming here for the weekend.'"
Also, this site, in a desert 100s of miles from any decent sized city, isn't really somewhere you'd want to hang out. Though I would note it's probably a DRY heat.
So what's going on? Well, says @nktpnd, a giant runway in the middle of the desert can be used for other things... testing secret aircraft and drones, for example.
"This does look like it could be a Chinese Area 51," he says.
Ok, but seriously. There's a lot we still don't know about the site, and a lot we may never know. But this does seem significant.
"I think we're observing a pretty important facility for China's military space activities, that appears to be growing," Panda says.
For a little more background on what makes the Lop Nur airfield so unusual, check out this thread from the space plane landing in 2020:
And as a final coda for the OSINT geeks, I'd just note that the beginnings of this construction was actually visible when the space plane landed in September of 2020! It just wasn't obvious yet what was happening at the site.
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Short 🧵: Data from the Chinese National Nuclear Safety Administration does seem to indicate a *slightly* elevated level of gamma radiation around the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant. These are the two monitoring stations closest (one on the left is at the plant).
As of yesterday, Taishan is at 153 nGy/h (153 nanograys per hour). That's above the level of other plants in the country.
The levels at both sites near Taishan NPP also seem to have been elevated since at least late May. This may be an indication that this has been going on for awhile, and is not an immediate emergency.
And now @MAXAR's worldview satellite has supplied high-resolution imaging from earlier this very day, showing that there is still a ship stuck in the Suez Canal. #OSINTatWork
I would just like to point out that we now have confirmation of a ship stuck in the Suez Canal using multiple space-based sensors.
We also have imagery at different resolutions... And different nadir angles at different times of day... (credit: @Maxar@Airbus@planetlabs and @capellaspace for that previous tweet)
OMG, @rebeccalramirez just put me on to the CDC's "coping with COVID" coloring book for kids, and it's an exercise in anxiety.
Not sure I'll sleep tonight.
I'm the grown-up and I feel ALL OF THESE THINGS!
It's not your fault Timmy. It's happening. You're powerless to stop it. It is affecting every aspect of your life, and your loved ones may be in danger.
A lot of people are tweeting about how this new Pfizer vaccine finding has not been peer-reviewed. That's true, but it's also important to understand that academic peer-review is not the only way to be scientifically rigorous... 🧵
In the case of clinical trials, there are a number of methods to keep bias out of data. One is to "blind" the trial, so that both patients and those administering the vaccine don't know who gets the drug and who gets the placebo. This trial was fully blinded.
In other words, patients, scientists, clinicians, and even Pfizer executives had no idea who got the vaccine and who didn't. Only a small team of statisticians and medical monitors remained unblinded to keep the trial on track. They had no direct contact with the trial team.
First off, if you're in need of big picture view, check out this story featuring @brianweeden and @planet4589, which gives a nice summary of where things stand (an audio version also be on @npratc tonight!).
The airstrip literally appeared out of nowhere in 2016. It's on the edge of an old Chinese nuclear test site called Lop Nur (sometimes Lop Nor). And it's unusual for a couple of reasons....
First, the theory: It's known as "herd immunity". If enough people catch COVID-19 and recover, and if they are immune, then the entire population will be protected. Estimates vary widely, but somewhere between 50%-80% of a given pop would need to catch COVID for this to work.
Herd immunity is real, but historically only discussed in terms of vaccination campaigns.
For example, if 95% of a population is vaccinated against measles (very contagious) then a single case cannot spread into the community.