Wednesday, October 7, 2026
They Buried
We Dug It Up
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PX-2191
PUBLIC RECORD, PLUS TWO PRIVATE WORKINGS SUPPLIED
INVENTED FOR A FICTIONAL NEWSPAPER

Twenty-six hours of published record, 9–10 December 2009, with two amateur trackers' working

Origin
Contemporaneous news reports and a defence ministry statement; two private notebooks
Dated
9–10 December 2009; workings supplied 2026
Extent
reports and statement 19; workings 12 pages
Status
accepted
Redactions
None. The bracketed note is ours and is marked as ours.

Chain of custody

The reports and the statement are public and were collected by their publication timestamps rather than by anybody's recollection, because how long the answer took is the whole point of the story and memory is bad at durations. The two workings were supplied to this newspaper in May 2026 by the people who did them in 2009 — a retired air-traffic controller and a boiler engineer — who still had them and who are named in our notes with consent.

Held by: They Buried, document room; the trackers retain their originals

Excerpt

09 Dec, morning — meteorological institute: not atmospheric.
09 Dec, morning — launching state: no launch took place.
09 Dec, later    — amateur trajectory reconstruction circulated from photographs.
10 Dec, +26h    — ministry confirms: submarine launch; first two stages
                  nominal; third-stage malfunction; vehicle span.

[The interval between the last two lines is one day. The photograph has been
in circulation for seventeen years.]

Transcribed by the data desk. Line breaks follow the original. Bracketed matter is ours.

Editor's note

Filed as the vault's clearest measurement of the gap this newspaper keeps running into. The answer was correct, cheap, fast and voluntary. It has travelled worse than the picture by a factor nobody has measured and this newspaper cannot measure either. A boiler engineer got there first, which is the part the document desk would like remembered.

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