Charlie Stross
(Via reddit): "Q: what gives away that someone is not a good person?"
Me: it's always a red flag if they start showing you pictures of their secret base inside an extinct volcano on a tropical island, and there are missile launchers and boiler-suited minions in mirrorshades in the background.
Especially if their selfies all feature a fluffy white cat and a control room with a map of the world labelled TARGET.
Foone🏳️⚧️
@cstross yeah I was thinking: if I was the UK or US government, I'd make sure there was always a Bond-type secret agent within a kilometer of every "guy who owns a space program".
Not saying they WILL go off the deep end and turn into a super villain, but you just don't want to risk it.
Maybe they have a bad day and decide some governmental body needs to go down: they effectively have an ICBM on hand, and just because it's non-nuclear doesn't mean it's harmless.
Foone🏳️⚧️
@cstross cause I'm sure no government wants to have to learn the Kzinti Lesson because of some billionaire who had a bad divorce and decided to blow up parliament or the Capitol building
Charlie Stross
@foone This is especially true of SpaceX, who have a demonstrated repeatable capability to drop a ~hundred ton booster onto a bullseye, only dropping subsonic in the last couple of seconds of flight. Forget the landing burn and it's a smart FAE bomb the size of a MOAB, incoming faster than a point defense C-RAM can track.
Foone🏳️⚧️
@cstross yeah. if you can launch a booster that big, you don't really need a payload. that'd just be a bonus. A supersonic booster dropping on a building because it "went off course" and failed to fire the retrorockets? that's pretty fucking destructive
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