I got two of these types of emails last night. While I have occasionally viewed a raunchy video, it was pretty clearly hinky, for numerous reasons (misspellings, fact that the password is not associated with either my email of Facebook, and I don’t even have a Messenger account, I rarely allow a webcam to see me, etc.). If it was a serious threat, they’d send a sample video.
This is a federal felony, but I find it kind of amazing that if you want to report it to the FBI, you do it by phone, instead of forwarding to an email address. The country’s in the very best of hands.
Almost exactly a year ago, we flew to Florida to start to prep a house to sell. Instead, we had to prep it for a major hurricane. Fortunately (for us, not the west coast of the state), Irma’s track shifted to the west, and we didn’t get the brunt of it. A year later, we’re here again, this time in the last throes of renovation. But now Gordon just formed in the Keys, and we’re getting a washout here today in Palm Beach County, so no progress on the house today. Our major goal for the day is managing to get down to Plantation for dinner with Bob and Lou Poole (as in the Reason Foundation). Fortunately, things should be calming down by then for southeast Florida, and the storm will be moving off into the Gulf, where it may threaten the northern Gulf Coast.
Jeff Foust writes about the unheralded 25th anniversary of the DC-X flights, and what has happened in the past half decade to see the promise that it offered a quarter of a century ago finally coming to fruition. I attended the 20th anniversary, but the only thing happening this year is a dinner in LA later this month.
I would note, per the criticism of the “purists,” that SSTO is highly overrated. Two-stage systems are much more flexible and efficient, particularly for off-nominal missions (e.g., high inclination or high altitude). SSTO would make sense only for a large traffic model to a single destination, probably equatorial.
I missed this earlier in the week, but Mike Snead has a long essay on passenger safety over at The Space Review. It’s a useful history, that touches on many of the themes of my book, but I believe that it’s technologically premature to apply the principles to human spaceflight. Spaceflight participants (not passengers) must be aware of the risks of the varied methods of building spaceships, and accept them accordingly. No one should, at this point in history, get aboard one with the same expection of getting safely off that one does with an airliner, particularly because different people have different risk tolerances and goals. There will come a time when trips to space will be considered common carrier, on certified vehicles, but we are years from that time.
I’m going to reserve judgment until I see the film. I think that the proximate cause of the uproar wasn’t the decision to leave out the flag planting, but the Canadian actor’s idiotic explanation of it. As I note in comments, the movie is a biopick of Neil Armstrong, not a history of Apollo, and his great achievement was not in planting a flag on the moon, but in simply being present on its surface.
I could never understand why the Bush administration let Iran get away with so much. They were waging war on us (and have been since 1979), and the administration did essentially nothing. And then Obama came along and bent us over for them and didn’t even ask for lube. Thanks, Valerie!
This is terrible, and a huge loss to the lunar development community. I just saw him in January at the lunar landing science workshop at Ames. He had finally come around to oppose SLS. Condolences to his family and other friends, RIP, and ad astra.
[Update a few minutes later]
More from Leonard David, who was as shocked by the news as I am. I hadn’t been aware that he had lung cancer.
[Update on June 8, 2021]
Paul’s widow, Anne, asked me to update this post to note that, contra a comment here, Paul had quit smoking in 1988, and was informed by his doctors that it was not the cause of his cancer.