Test pilot/commercial astronaut who’s Forest Gumped his way through an amazing aerospace piloting career. Didn’t write “Test Gods”, just takes the blame ;)

Joined February 2015
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I’m on X for two main reasons - 1) to give unique insight into aerospace topics garnered from my unusually broad test pilot career. 2) To inject humor (usually sarcastic and sophomoric at best) in the hopes of getting at least one person to smile. Follow me if you want to live…
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I’m not a gym rat but it’s hard for me to believe that there’s any serious body builder out there that wouldn’t instantly recognize the janitor in the shiny blue coveralls, with the weird mop and crappy disguise for who he really is.
The heaviest mop 45 Kg 😮🤯😱💪💪💪🔥🔥💯☠️☠️☠️☠️!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Nice words
Replying to @Devon_Eriksen_
Spoken like a true modern objectivist, But with new insights and deep conviction. I wrote this for my daughter when she was about 8 years old.
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Replying to @doctrsuess
We are sending the best NASA astronauts based on crew rotation, background, and expertise on Artemis III. The same way we sent our best on Artemis II. The same way we send our best astronauts to the International Space Station, where the recent Crew-10 through Crew-13 assignments ALL include female commanders and crews that are no less than 50% female. Not because it was a requirement, but because they are the best astronauts for the job. Celebrate the Artemis III crew the same way we will celebrate all crews who follow that will walk again on the Moon.
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Captured by Anduril's network of 400 telescopes deployed around the globe: The second stage of the Falcon Heavy launch of ViaSat 3-F3 performing a routine thrust event. This produced a spiraled-shaped plume effect, a nominal part of operations for a successful launch of Viasat's latest satellite.
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Uh, basic Soldier 101 failure right there
U.S. Army soldiers accidentally pick up IED in Afghanistan. A soldier picks up what looks to be an old artillery shell. After realizing the whole thing was rigged with wiring, he quickly ran away.
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You know it will be a good ceremony when they have such cool ceiling ornaments. I was purposely early so I took a stroll around the amazing aircraft displays. Some guy was standing next to a woman by the SR-71 explaining “the entire thing is made out of *magnesium*!” I kept my mouth shut and kept walking
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Now that is some fantastic news! Hopefully accurate, too!
Some LC-36 updates. Now that we’ve had access to the pad and integration facility we can share a bit of good news. The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG tanks are all in good shape. This is good luck because these are very long lead items. The water tower is also good. The big support tower is damaged, but it can be repaired in place rather than torn down and replaced. The booster “Never Tell Me The Odds” and the three GS-2s that were onsite in the integration facility also look good. I’ve seen some speculation that we might move directly to the 9x4 configuration, but we won’t do that. Rate manufacturing of 7x2 is going well, and we’re going to continue that at pace as planned and store the stages for use. In addition, we had already been working for some time on eliminating our transporter-erector in favor of an alternative vertical conop, and we’ll now go directly to that; so we don’t need a new transporter-erector. We will fly again before the end of this year. Gradatim Ferociter.
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It will be interesting to understand the setup (will the launch date depend on the researcher’s biological cycle?), what instrumentation will be used, and what data collected during the couple of minutes of microgravity? How do the boost forces immediately prior to the short period of microgravity affect the data? What will be learned of value as opposed to what has already been learned by the numerous “real” female astronauts that have orbited onboard space stations for months at a time?
Welcoming Operation Period to our 2027 spaceflight manifest. This will be the first spaceflight ever dedicated to studying menstruation in microgravity, investigating how space travel affects menstrual physiology, with implications for astronaut health and reproductive medicine on Earth. This is what inclusive-by-design research looks like → bit.ly/VG-OPBlog
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Reports of a major explosion near or at @blueorigin’s LC-36 launch pad at Cape Canaveral.
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Memorial Day is specially memorable for me because of a crash that occurred in Iraq on Memorial Day 2005, killing a handful of USAF special forces (including the pilot). I was sent there with a small team to do flight test in their aircraft. They had numerous severe deficiencies.
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Although hang gliders & paragliders often fly thousands of feet above the valley floor, they typically are within a few hundred feet of terrain. Their reserve parachutes have special bridle lengths so as to be deployed w/o cutting away & [hopefully] w/o tangling with the glider!
🚨 WATCH: A paraglider gets hit by a Cessna 172 near the Austrian town of Zell am See. The paraglider was able to pull her rescue parachute and land safely shortly after the incident on Saturday. According to police, the 44-year-old Austrian had started from Schmittenhöhe in the direction of Piesendorf. Above the Pinzgauer Hütte, she collided at 1:15 p.m. with the Cessna piloted by a 28-year-old. The pilot of the Cessna, which flew from the Glemm Valley in the direction of Zell am See, was able to land the aircraft safely at Zell am See Airport. Video: sab_thi
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What I’d really like to know are the *long term* effects, if any (e.g. reduced or increased risk of dementia?).
A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.
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If only the real deal had a thrust to weight that high.
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It’s great when people treat the public with respect and give them honest and educated commentary. Too much of that is lost in these days of “what if” lawyering and marketing.
I just had the craziest experience at the airport. We are about to board a flight to Atlanta when the pilot from the incoming plane walks out of the jetway. Guy is probably late 50s, salt and pepper hair, military look. The kind of pilot you instantly feel good about seeing on your flight. Pilot walks over to the counter, gets on the PA system, and starts addressing everyone. “Folks, I’ve been doing this a long time. Flying one of these jets is easy. The hard part is looking at 130 people and telling them their flight is going to be delayed.” Audible groans throughout the boarding gate. Most people here are flying to Atlanta as a layover before another flight. 130 people just had their day become a complete mess. The pilot goes on. “I get it, trust me. But here’s the deal: During our landing, we had a small mechanical issue. I’m not your pilot for the next leg, but I don’t feel confident the jet’s safe to fly until we have a mechanical team look it over, and I don’t feel comfortable asking the next pilots to fly you guys until we get confirmation.” He points at the agents next to him behind the counter: “Now, none of this is the agents’ fault. Please be kind to them. I’m the one who made this decision, not them, so any inconvenience you experience is my fault. Just please know that I don’t do this lightly, and I’m only doing it because I believe it’s in the best interests of everyone’s safety.” Now this is where the story gets crazy. The pilot puts the microphone down, grabs his suitcase, and all the people in the gate… Start clapping. I’m not joking, everyone starts clapping for the guy. 130 people who just had their travel plans ruined give an ovation to the guy who made the decision and delivered the message. All because he addressed them with decency and transparency, took ownership of the decision, made it clear that it was necessary, and explained why it was in everyone’s best interest. It’s honestly one of the best examples of strong communication—of strong leadership, for that matter—that I’ve seen in a long time. @Delta, whoever your Atlanta to Wichita pilot was this morning, he’s one of the good ones. Please tell him the delayed passengers of flight 1637 appreciate what he did.
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Ugh, that’s one expensive crash. Very rare for both sets of aircrew to escape a mid-air like that. I hope all involved are ok.
Footage of the mid air collision between a pair of Navy Super Hornets/Growlers during the Gunfighter Skies Air Show at Mountain Home Air Force Base moments ago.
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Remembering a legend. share.google/YeILK31Plkae8iS…
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Years ago I threw away boxes of aircraft paraphernalia that I had been lugging around for years, including my complete United Airlines brief case. It recently showed up on somebody’s property there in Las Cruces. I guess somebody at the dump held onto it for awhile!
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Fund raiser for Frank White, the author of the Overview Effect to get a space flight. I did not experience the overview effect on my SS2 flight above 50 miles. There was no sudden revelation or life-changing event. moondao.com/overview
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I never heard or saw mention of X-15 pilots experiencing it either. It was certainly an amazing view and incredible experience. Maybe we were too busy test piloting & maybe it takes more time to relax and absorb the experience?
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