I had terrible flights, today. I have a cold, so I was miserable to start. Then at DCA, Americans delayed my flight to Phoenix, then had me go to a different terminal to catch it, while changing my seat from my window toward the front to a center toward the rear(with no explanation), with a woman in the window seat who had zero interest in what was going on outside, so I spent over four hours in a semi-claustrophobic condition. (As an aside, I’m kind of astonished at how many people in window seats have zero curiosity and desire to see where they are, keeping shades down throughout).
Then, when I get to Phoenix, my connection to LA is delayed three hours, which is why I have time to bitch about it. But I hope I’ll be home soon, with Patricia and the cats, after being gone for over a week.
ISDC is over, and I’m flying to DC in the morning. Driving down to Norfolk from there on Thursday to do a presentation on equatorial LEO at CRASTE. But I’ll have more time to check in this week once I’m ensconced there. I heard something about a bomber raid in Iran.
OK, so I understand that if you want to quickly bust a bunker, you need a bunker buster. But what if there's no hurry? Because you completely dominate the skies? Why can't Israel just keep dropping more-conventional bombs, one after another, in each consecutive crater? Wouldn't…
Ignoring the dumb headline, Joel Kotkin has an interesting story on the new tech hub in the South Bay. I helped set up some of the plant visits for it.
A good analysis of what’s been happening over the past day in Iran.
1. The Israel-Iran war: The first day. We are now about 15 hours after Israel launched what it labels a *preventive strike* against the Islamic Republic of Iran – targeting its nuclear facilities and ballistic missile sites.
Here’s a short recap of what’s happened – and what…
It seemed pretty clear that something was going to happen when we evacuated embassies in the region.
[Update early afternoon]
Iran has been waging war on us for over 45 years, while we've been pretending they weren't so we didn't have to do anything about it. We got away with it because they hadn't yet developed the capability to hurt us other than killing our soldiers in the region (it certainly wasn't…
Iran has been launching retaliatory missile strikes against Tel Aviv, with most of them intercepted. I don’t think I’d want to be on Kharg Island on any day, but definitely not today.
With approval for another flight as early as next week, SpaceX has released a report on what happened on the last two flights, and what they’ve done to prevent a repeat of either.
[Tuesday-morning update]
For those with X, Elon is about to talk about getting multi-planetary, as a prelude to this afternoon’s launch attempt. For the Xless, just go to SpaceX.com.
[Update a few minutes later]
It just changed the start time from 1015 PDT to 1800. So after the flight, instead of before?