Matthew Gast

Also, fun observation: the evening opened with Keisuke Nakagoshi playing Rachmaninoff on the piano, and he had the score on an iPad with a bluetooth page-turning foot pedal. It was cool being close enough to the stage to be able to see the use of modern technology up close.

I went to the SF Philharmonic concert last night. I'd forgotten how much I love the dynamic range of Tchaikovsky's works.

Or, you know, you could just issue refunds in Euros. The credit card I used to make the purchase would happily convert for me, and it's clearly much less work for them, since they can do it for less than 14% of the total amount!

I was quite surprised that on a day when the official rate was 1 EUR = 1.06 USD, you were able to issue a refund at 1 EUR = 0.92 USD.

@Visita_Madrid your tax-free shopping web site should be more honest about how big a cut the paper-pushing companies take

As somebody who is old enough to remember Branson painting Virgin America planes with "No Way BA/AA," this amuses me.

Flying home from Europe today, and I'm in the British Airways lounge. They provide Wi-Fi, with a captive portal. I'm probably one of the few people in the world who'd notice that the captive portal is hosted at virginwifi.com.

Weird experience today. @sofi sent me a marketing offer for a credit card and bank account. They opened the bank account, but couldn't verify my identity for the credit card, and pointed me at ... my Experian credit report that showed they pulled my credit?

5. Because there was no propeller slipstream, takeoff resembled gliders - no right rudder, and don't have the stick fully deflected when you reach the speed at which the controls are effective. (Pilot training is said to have taken care of most of this difference.)

4a. The fuel was so toxic that if it leaked it was deadly. Apparently one pilot dissolved in a fuel leak. (eeeeew)

4. Because the motor was a rocket engine using hypergolic propellant with limited run time, the engine didn't drive an electrical system. The tiny, tiny propeller on later models was a ram-air turbine that used the plane's motion to drive it's electrical system

3b. I've heard of (and even witnessed) gear up landings, but never heard of a gear-up takeoff until now.

3a. The first version of the dolly had sprung wheels, and if you dropped it too low it might bounce off the ground and hit the plane!

3. It didn't have a landing gear on the airframe, just a skid. For the takeoff roll, there was a wheeled dolly the pilot had to remember to drop. (I assume it's for CG reasons but can't find the original flight manual to see for certain.)

2. Because it was always out of gas on landing, it landed unpowered. The airframe design borrowed from gliders.

1. It was rocket powered. It carried enough fuel for 7.5 minutes of thrust. It could get to 39,000 feet in 3.5 min, so it didn't have that much combat time when on station.

In World War 2, Germany had a rocket plane, the Me-163 Komet. I knew about it, and have even seen an example in a museum, and today I learned a few fun things about it

No surprise here, this has been rumored for a month or so. justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/for…

I really hope that another answer was "The program where @OphiraE and @jonathancoulton keep telling people they don't need to answer in the form for a question"

It's also interesting to think about how the very real NASA considered locations near San Francisco, which is the home base of the very fictional Starfleet.