technology

You can pry it spinning out of my cold hands, officer!

One more for the ages: This potential international incident is plausible because it can conclude in a way that doesn't significantly veer from the international status quo! If the current administration deemed this necessary to win the election, it's plausible the security and intelligence apparatus might deem it harmless enough to go forward!

This is on the basis that:

• China only loses an empty capsule and possibly their already poisoned reputation as a scientific and capable modern country among imperial core libs and chuds. Annoying, but ultimately this just confirms where they already stand.
• Russia loses two astronauts to this bullshit but is already in a proxy war with NATO anyway. Whatever their response is will be seen on the battlefield in Ukraine, only wasting lives that US state leadership has already demonstrated it does not care for.
• This means not much materially to the remainder of the imperial core than another civilian airliner accidentally shot down by some national military.
• And it all matters even less to the DPRK.
• China, Russia, and the DPRK all totally ban aerospace scientific cooperation with the United States going forward.

The US population as a whole memoryholes this after the media botches the story and the conspiracy somehow becomes a culture war issue, deciding the election one way or the other. By the inauguration, it remains too partisan for any respected government authority to declare any sort of realistic official story. Despite this, they are sure to keep any discussion of this being a deliberate move by the United States catergorized as misinfo under some new, vague internet regulatory agency started by executive order and later codified by congress.

Mainstream media diligently follows along with all the recommendations like the good little stenographers they are, and large lib social media companies follow suit instinctively, for a time banning the topic for being a foreign conspiracy. It doesn't matter which country they impotently end up blaming to anyone but US immigrants from that country.