I am sure the video was faked because I did orbital analysis with SZ-7 and compared the scene in the ‘live video’ and found many inconsistencies, e.g. the spacecraft was actually flying over a land while the ‘live video’ showed ocean on its camera (pointing backward of its moving direction).
Sorry I don’t have time for now to explain the details, but if you are interested I could later send you my communications with a friend on this. If you happen to be an amateur radio /astronomy fan you could do the orbital analysis yourself. The orbital parameters (TLE) can be downloaded from http://www.space-track.org/ , the catalogue number for SZ-7 is 33386.
Wait -- he's basing his entire conclusion on the the fact that the ground appearing in the video didn't match where he thought the spacecraft should be at the time?? I happen to know a fair bit about satellite tracking, having written software from scratch to do it, so I can authoritatively say that this is just plain silly.
Which of these possibilities seem more likely?
1. The orbital elements were off. Manned spacecraft in low earth orbit are notorious for the very short lifetimes of their published orbital element sets. Manned spacecraft frequently maneuver, and they're usually in such low orbits that atmospheric drag is both significant and unpredictable, as it depends on solar activity and the orientation of the spacecraft. A small amount of unmodeled drag will integrate quickly (often over less than a day) to significant along-track position errors.
So the NORAD elesets are often out of date by the time a civilian gets them from official sources. Sometimes they're out of date even when NORAD gets them, as it depends on their source: recent NORAD tracking or simply passed on from the spacecraft operator. (I have personally generated an element set for a satellite, given it to NORAD, and seen it appear later in their published elesets).
2. The spacewalk broadcast wasn't actually 'live' - the Chinese (or some news agency) recorded the EVA and played it later. Many recordings are made of broadcasts with the word LIVE on the screen, and obviously that word does not apply when the recordings are played back.
3. Zheng was confused about his geography and where the camera was actually pointing.
4. The Chinese faked the whole thing, doing such an outstanding job on the special effects that nearly every western space engineer (except for Zheng) is still completely fooled.
