A History of Secret Societies, by Akron Daraul (aka Idries Shah). Pocket Books, 1969.

Luckily anyone exposed to Ccru before 2020 was already mentally prepared

I spent my career doing exactly those analyses :) We don’t have a method to measure velocity of fine particles in those data sets — not even AI can solve it since the data are simply not obtainable in visible wavelength videos — so our velocity estimate has an uncertainty of about a factor of 3 in either direction (i.e., a factor of ~10 from slowest likely speed to highest). The structure of the boundary layer in those conditions is unsolved fundamental physics and it affects the particle velocities, so our models are very uncertain. That means kinetic energy and hardware damage is uncertain by a factor of about 10^2 =100. That uncertainty will not affect lander safety but will affect the size of blast zones to protect surrounding hardware and will be a matter of international disagreement. Also we believe that regime transitions occur in the physics when we go to much larger thrust on the soil like with the new generation of human-rated landers. That will cause deep cratering that threatens the lander. Apollo only did surface scour, not deep cratering mechanisms (bearing capacity failure and diffusion-driven shearing). We have to study it experimentally on Earth, but the tests are crazy expensive and not perfect fidelity due to gravity and atmosphere. I recently presented to nasa my view that there is another deep cratering mechanism that we did not previously recognize, and that it may be the dominant mechanism. I’m calling it bulk peeling. We have hints that it occurred in the final moments of the Apollo landings when the nozzle was very near the surface. If so, then deeper cratering may be up to 10 times worse than we currently estimate. This concern has, AFAIK, not been factored in to any planning. Thats why I asked for the NASA meeting last week and briefed them on it. I don’t know if any action will result. We have very little ability to predict what happens when those cratering regime transitions occur. We are actively working on these problems, but NASA upper management has never believed it is big enough of a problem to put enough resources into it to fully solve it. Ultimately it is wound up in the overall political and funding processes since claiming the Moon is harder makes it less likely to get funded. It took me 15 years inside NASA to get program management to admit it was a concern at all. By the end of Constellation the program finally started talking about concepts for mitigation. Then constellation was cancelled. Now, the work is indeed being funded, but IMO not at nearly high enough level to solve the problem before return to the Moon. I think we will get a wake up call after the first uncrewed HLS landings when we see how much regolith including larger rocks was blown and the size of the holes under the nozzles, and then it will be a freakout moment realizing we don’t have enough time to deal with it before China lands humans on the Moon. Therefore, there will be high political pressure to convince ourselves it isn’t a problem despite what we see in those landings. That could end up allowing too much risk of mission failure and loss of crew to persist un-retired during the U.S. human landings. Even if we do take time to retire the risks adequately, it will be too late to beat China back to the Moon since they will almost certainly use a smaller Apollo-scale lander which will not have the same concerns. So it will be (I predict) a choice between convincing ourselves to ignore risks versus losing the geopolitical advantages of getting back sooner. That worries me.

“Ethically non-monogamous” I can just tell you who’s hotter. If that’s what you’re trying to figure out, I can tell you right now actually.

These shots are incredible!

NASA is starting to talk publicly about the threat of exclusion zones on the Moon. arstechnica.com/space/2026/0…