The US military says it now keeps space weapons in orbit, and my team measured what happened in nineteen back gardens.
The US military has confirmed it keeps weapons in orbit. Dr. Petra Voidwell's team was watching nineteen back gardens at the time and recorded a four-second pause in one lawnmower. She reports the orbital weapons as unremarkable and the mower as a crisis.
A mower went quiet on Sunday afternoon. Four seconds. That is the finding, and I want people to sit with it.
The United States had just confirmed it keeps weapons in orbit. My team was already watching nineteen back gardens for an unrelated project on grass height. One man looked up. The engine idled. Then he carried on, and the record shows a gap in the stripes where the blade slowed.
We also watched nineteen gardens in a town where nobody reads the news. Every mower ran straight through. That is our comparison group, and it tells us the news did this.
The chance it was luck is about one in nineteen. That is low enough to act on and high enough to keep me awake.
My co-author read the military statement twice, wrote "space control weapons, fine" in the margin, and went to get a sandwich. She is not concerned about the orbit part. She is concerned about the lawn.
On the weapons themselves I have little to add. They are up there. They defend things. Several are reportedly quite large, which is the sort of detail I would expect from a filing cabinet.
One garden is a small sample, and I would not write policy on it. I would leave the area.
