Kopeikin's latest paper on the internet, giving the basis for his findings announced at the AAS meeting, contains some egregious errors. The following claims appear therein: "… a moving gravitating body deflects light not instantaneously but with retardation caused by the finite speed of gravity propagating from the body to the light ray. … We calculated this correction for Jupiter by making use of the post-Minkowskian approximation based on the retarded Lienard-Wiechert solutions of the Einstein equations. … Speed of gravity cg must enter the left side of the Einstein equations (2) … This will lead to the wave operator depending explicitly on the speed of gravity cg."
None of these statements is correct even in GR, provided only that "the speed of gravity" retains its classical meaning for the past two centuries of force propagation speed. The Einstein equations require the potential field of all bodies to act from the body's instantaneous direction, not its retarded direction, because they set propagation delay for the gradient to zero. But Kopeikin adopts the Sun acting from its instantaneous position and Jupiter acting from its retarded position, which is inconsistent. In fact, although the Sun moves 1000 times more slowly than Jupiter, it is 1000 times more massive, making any hypothetical retardation effects comparably important. The Lienard-Wiechert equations consider retardation in mutual distance, but not in direction – the latter being a much larger effect of propagation delay. And the parameter on the left side of the Einstein equations is c2, and therefore has nothing to do with the speed of gravity, as we noted above. This does not prevent Kopeikin from calling it "cg" and solving for this parameter as if it were the speed of gravity, which is what he has done.
Sadly, Kopeikin here ignores both the existence of a long-standing controversy about the speed of gravity (defined as the propagation speed of gravitational force) [5] and the aforementioned arguments raised against his original interpretation by others. Kopeikin used the notion that this experiment might determine "the speed of gravity" to aggrandize the experiment, and perhaps also to justify funding for doing it. Yet the cg parameter measured is more closely related to the speed of light per se than anything else.
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However, the misrepresentation in this new paper and announcement is more serious than mixing speed-of-light and speed-of-gravity parameters. Kopeikin's new paper has modified the equations to be used in determining the speed of gravity in a fundamental way. His own formalism now rules out the possibility of cg = infinity or cg >> c in his results even before the experiment is performed. Here is why. Kopeikin now defines a new time tau = (c/cg) t to replace the coordinate time t in the Einstein equation. However, because (c/cg) is obviously forced to become very small or zero for large or infinite cg, the role of the time coordinate is diminished or suppressed altogether by this substitution, which effectively eliminates many relativistic effects already verified in other experiments. So even if the speed of "gravitational waves" had been much faster than the speed of light, Kopeikin's experiment is incapable of showing that with his present method of analysis. More than that, Kopeikin has violated scientific protocol by changing the equations to be used for the analysis after the results are in, thereby presumably avoiding the embarrassment of having to announce an unexpected result. We were also unable to verify one of his key references in the December 30 paper, "E. Fomalont & S. Kopeikin (2002)" which says simply "submitted to Science". But as of January 6, Science magazine has no record of such a submission.
His point was that the equations used in the analysis were incorrect. There are countless numbers of physicists looking at this right now. Van Flandern alternates in a random pattern between reality and kookism, so it would be well to read the paper for oneself or wait for further letters to the editor. I was going to read the paper last night, but the associated diagram will take some time to decipher, and the formulas seem to be scattered into constituent atoms.