Month: July 2023

Enlarge (credit: Banj Edwards | Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

"When checking the system this morning, I noticed your account logged in for over 20 hours," begins a December 1998 email from the president of my dial-up Internet service provider (ISP) at the time. "Our service is unlimited, but we ask that you actually be using the connection while logged in."

Today, when it seems like everyone is online 24/7 through smartphones and broadband, I'd be weird if I wasn't online for 20 hours straight. But 1998 in Raleigh, North Carolina, was different. In an age of copper telephone lines and dial-up modems, Internet access wasn't usually an always-on situation for a home user in the US. Each occupied telephone line meant another ISP customer couldn't use it—and no one could call you, either.

But I'm getting ahead of myself—why do I have an email from 1998?

Enlarge / Falcon 9 launches 54 Starlink satellites from SLC-40 in Florida on Saturday. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 6.03 of the Rocket Report! Today marks the 54th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. For decades this has meant a time to reflect on the glories of the past. But finally, with the Artemis Program, we can also look forward with hope about what is coming. That is something I am thankful for.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Rocket Lab recovers another booster. The launch company's Electron rocket boosted seven satellites for NASA, Space Flight Laboratory, and Spire Global on Tuesday. This was Rocket Lab's 39th launch overall, and after the primary mission Electron's first stage completed a successful ocean splashdown. Rocket Lab’s recovery team rendezvoused with the stage on the water, successfully bringing it onto a vessel using a specially designed capture cradle, the company said.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Think of a psychopath and any number of Hollywood villains might come to mind, from charming killers like Hannibal Lecter to Anton Chigurh, portrayed with chilling menace by Javier Bardem in the film No Country for Old Men. But the traits and symptoms of psychopathy run along scales that range from weak to strong. So, someone may be mildly psychopathic or severely so. There could be a psychopath sitting next to you right now.

Some psychologists argue that the focus on violent and criminal psychopathic behavior has marginalized the study of what they call “successful psychopaths”—people who have psychopathic tendencies but who can stay out of trouble, and perhaps even benefit from these traits in some way. Researchers haven’t yet reached a consensus on which traits distinguish successful psychopaths from serial killers, but they are working to clarify what they say is a misunderstood branch of human behavior. Some even want to reclaim and rehabilitate the concept of psychopathy itself.

“Most of what people think about psychopaths is not what psychopathy actually is,” says Louise Wallace, a lecturer in forensic psychology at the University of Derby, in England. “It is not glamorous. It is not a spectacle.” Psychopathic traits exist in everyone to some degree and shouldn’t be glorified or stigmatized, she says.