“A Shortfall of Gravitas” You may have heard this expression before. It is the name given by Elon Musk to one of his drone ships in the Atlantic, whose home port at Cape Canaveral is less than a mile from our October C&I hotel. With any luck, we will be able to see it firsthand at Saturday’s fellowship breakfast. On its deck may rest a recovered Falcon-9 booster, just a couple of hundred yards across the channel from our venue, Grills Seafood Deck Portside. The droneship’s name originates from a series of science fiction books by author Iain M….

  Honor, Devotion, Courage, and Love The Sacred Duty of Mentorship   An organized mentorship process represents the future of any organization. The mentors of the program are its genetic essence passed down to the next generation. Even in a colossus government organization like NASA, we also had a well-designed mentorship program. It taught mentorship and the basics of the process of passing down our heritage, while the memories and the history lived in still-beating hearts who drove into the office each day to share with the next generation of new NASA-reens. The modern Templars are no different. In NASA…

The meeting was running long – but no one was surprised. It was, after all, a government meeting of NASA engineering staff at the Kennedy Space Center, and these routinely ran overtime. Yet this particular confab was way overdue for someone with any recognizable authority (if they had any feelings left in their legs) to finally stand up and put a merciful end to our collective misery. It was mind-numbingly late in real physiological terms – way, way beyond any normal human’s attention span. And then some attention-seeking supervisor-wannabe stood up and asked something no one should ever, ever inquire…

I designed and supervised a contractor-build of the NASA undersea research habitat, the Scott Carpenter Space Analog Station, known as the Carpenter Station. One of the perks of being the Aquanaut Mission Commander on a NASA undersea mission was that I was able to hand-select my Executive Officer. There was no question who I would select: the military-trained, professional, and most competent aquanaut on the planet – Claudia Chaberland. Claudia was already a NASA subcontractor, so the choice was easy. The Carpenter Station was an ambient pressure habitat, meaning it featured an always-open bottom hatch called a “moonpool.” The pressure…

Geologists have evidence that 32,000 years ago, on the western edge of the Hawaiian Island of Oahu, a relatively small volcano whose west-facing wall lay alongside the Atlantic Ocean, experienced a major underwater fissure along an undersea flank. Perhaps caused by a minor magmatic tremor, it allowed countless thousands of gallons of cool seawater to suddenly pour into a complex labyrinthine network of volcanic lava tubes already heated to hundreds of degrees by the underground chambers of liquid rock. The sudden flash of steam in the enclosed geologic formation exploded with such violence that the entire western wall of the…

The ongoing war in the Holy Land was prompted exclusively by Hamas terrorists’ violent invasion and targeting of Jewish civilians on 7 October 2023. The wholly justified counterattack by the Israeli Defense Forces has never been the subject of any valid rational criticism. Throughout the history of humanity, any nation has the unalienable right to self-defense and the security of its people. But in the months following October 2023, the IDF military focus of ridding the Gaza Strip of Hamas terrorists has become progressively ambiguous and has since devolved into a moral catastrophe of historic magnitude for Israel and the…

  I had not been out of the United States Navy for even four months when a retired Air Force colonel co-worker entered my new office at Oklahoma State University with a direct order. That “order” was for me to wholeheartedly champion some random thought that had emerged out of his own personal “wild blue yonder” that required some serious work hours expended by anyone but himself. Completely unknown to the colonel, his biggest offense was daring to officiously enter my office without offering me a steaming cup of coffee made to my liking. That is actually why we got…

How Templars Cope in the Holy Land ___ The Multimorbidity of Cause and Effect In mid-December of 1972, on the midwestern plains at Oklahoma State University, the northwestern skies were deep blue and ugly. I had just completed my last final exam of the semester and was frantically packing my 1963 Ford Galaxie 500. It was a beast – an eight-cylinder gas-guzzling big-boy who could move down the highway with a purpose. And on that day, I definitely needed purpose. The first flakes of snow were falling just ahead of a certified blizzard that loomed behind the dark clouds hanging…

  I grew up on the lush Oklahoma prairies. The wild range grasses were beautifully green in the spring. They were fed by the early rains and naturally fertilized through the spring weather that converted the elemental atmospheric nitrogen by the ubiquitous lightning storms into the various bio-available oxides of nitrogen that the verdant vegetation below needed to grow. Springtime on the great plains was filled with beauty – and occasionally with great violence. If you wanted the green grass, you had to pay for it with the occasional angry, black skies of spring. And all that annual violence was…

Click here for more details and to register! Prior Dennis Chamberland and Prior Howard Giraldo request your presence at A Knight with Team Florida! Our two Priories are excited and honored to co-host our joint Autumnal Convent and Investiture for the Priory of The Temple Church and the newest Priory in GPUSA, the Priory of The Holy Trinity. This historic and solemn C&I, officiated by our Deputy Grand Prior for Region III, Chev. Frederick A. Cassidy, GOTJ, will take place in Cape Canaveral, Florida, October 3-5, 2025. Festivities include a Friday evening Priors’ Reception and dinner introducing six Postulants at…