Deus ex Machina

I have a friend (let's call him Alex), who is a very talented young man, educated as airspace engineer, had an experience of working for Khrunichev corp., and presently combines working in editorial staff of the most respectable Russian spaceflight magazine, owning a private business (a souvenir Internet shop which also offers model rockets and rocket engines), and finally, he is an originator of periodically held meeting of fans of model rocketry in Moscow region. I took part in one such, buy occasion, and it was fantastic to see all those rocket rise into the blue sky in the countryside. In the last year, many more people become taking part in his rocket festivals. To say the least, he is virtually the only supplier of model rocket engines on entire Russian market.

But a while ago, he unexpectedly encountered a person who is best described as his personal ill wisher. That man tracked my friend's activities on the Internet, sought for announcements of rocket festivals to be held and wrote complaints to police and aircraft traffic supervision, claiming that my friend's activities are risky for safety of air traffic or break laws forbidding keeping explosive materials, etc. One or two times the rocketry festivals got sabotaged by this man and rocketry fans had to leave spots in the field where they tried to launch their rockets. That happened despite there was no real risk (no launches were done in areas where planes fly low overhead) or cases of laws violation. My friend had to resort to announcing plans for future launch festivals in locked blog entries, visible for friends only.

That strange man put great effort to cause bigger damage to my friend's activities, such as blackmailing his boss in spaceflight magazine, writing a letter to Roscosmos (that was a funniest one, he wrote that "Alex was a proponent or space expansion and would want to take over the entire space for himself") and organizing an "alternative" rocket festival. The entire way of doing that his own way sounded like a joke, because he: (1) claimed the site where he had just driven Alex from, (2) stole Alex's festival name, changing one letter, (3) never built an actual model rocket, (4) made his festival participants pay him a fee for participation. Eventually, nobody came to his festival, and more people came to Alex.

And today Alex has posted a following message in his blog, saying that this morning he's got a call from Lubyanka asking him to come for a talk. He went and they told him that his ill-wisher bombarded a Procesutor's office with squeals about Alex's activities and ragged too much on everybody. Nobody has taken this man's complaints seriously, but rather, considered the cause of Alex good. He was briefed on necessary safety procedures, introduced to documents regulating air traffic zone assignment, and was even offered to having been reserved a field for model rocket launches for entire year! They only asked to make a call in advance to his assigned case manager before moving away for a next festival.

That is what I call life is full of surprises!