It was a nice Piedmont Dawn here in rural Virginia. We had no reports of fuel leaks, though the banging on the roof was a little abrupt. Drama was mostly external, though some collateral damage was completely expected. You can’t expect to peel a sheet metal skin off a house without a little impact noise, right?

The roofing crew arrived shortly before 0900. The first activity associated with it was writing a fairly significant check after signing a fairly routine contractual agreement. Actual billable work is now in progress, so forgive a certain amount of ambiguity from those of us under the roof that will be ripped from beam and joist above. And of course the Lunar shot controversy.

We have been waiting fifty years for that, and expected to have a launch from Florida already this morning. Apparently we are now in a race with the Chinese to return to the moon and set up an operational base of some sort. We are generally in favor of the enterprise, though we have also managed to pass the decades since the last time humans walked up there without incident.

We talked about some of the other issues floating about in the same sort of zero-gravity uncertainty. Behind the Chinese news are other issues. The USCG cutter refused entry into the Solomon Islands for fueling. The transit of the Taiwan strait by two USN Cruisers we recall steaming with long ago. The real estate problem across the Pacific that is eerily similar to the one that finished the Japanese economic titan’s performance a decade or two ago.

That is just the Chinese news this morning. We already expect energy shortages in Europe based on strange decisions on energy distribution that should have been acknowledged as part of the problem in an interlocked world. This morning? We are delaying the Artemis launch by a few days but appear determined to shoot the rocket this week. The season of cold and hunger seem equally determined to visit, and as inexorable as the pounding on the roof. It will make a lively day here at Refuge Farm, with Peruvian-Americans darting in for other related contractual and compensation issues.

So, the madness has already commenced here. Should we decide to launch any rockets locally, we will keep you posted! Just for reference, we do not intend to vector anything toward the western Pacific!

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