"The duty is seen today as a dull anachronism," says former launch officer John Noonan.
Noonan is a former Air Force launch officer, a job in which he held the codes for launching intercontinental nuclear missiles.
Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman launch officer, heads the anti-nuclear group Global Zero, teaches at Princeton University, and campaigns against a launch-on-warning policy.
The first envelops an area around the launch pad at Space Launch Complex 40, and the second covers a larger area around Landing Zone 1, a former Atlas launch facility once known as Space Launch Complex 13.
Another founder provided the financing that helped a former employee launch AMD.
BMW, a former premium launch partner, will have to wait a little while longer, along with other car companies like Ford, General Motors, and Honda.
Last week Khalifa Haftar, a former general, launched a fresh assault on Benghazi with support from the Libyan government, the United Arab Emirates and, allegedly, Egypt.
The whereabouts of Burundi's president, Pierre Nkurunziza – initially reported on Wednesday to be flying home from a summit in Tanzania – were unknown after a former ally launched a coup in his absence following weeks of protests sparked by Nkurunziza's deeply unpopular decision to seek a third term in office.
In an Op-Ed published on Tuesday in the Times, Bruce G. Blair, a former missile-launch control officer and now a research scholar in the Program on Science and Global Security, at Princeton, warned of the risks that hacking pose to America's nuclear arsenal.
Lastly, the new firmware paves the way for iOS and an Android remote with the former launching relatively soon.
