A weekday in May, 1961.  Miss Hill's second grade class in South Pittsburg TN.  We all come in to find one of those 23" B/W metal case TV sets on a 4ft tall roll-around AV stand in the corner  ....we're going to watch TV in school!    Didn't matter what, we were excited.    Mid afternoon Miss Hill rolls the TV to the front of the room, pulls up the rabbit ears and, as the set warms up, tells us briefly of the space program.  And we watch Alan Shepard's sub-orbital flight, from preflight coverage to splashdown and recovery.  For most of the class it was an interesting diversion, but I was fascinated.  From then til I graduated high school nine years later I kept stacks of magazines and scrapbooks of everything I found about NASA;  built detailed models of all the launch vehicles and capsules;  could quote from memory all the missions from Mercury through Apollo, names of the astronauts, the vehicles, the dates, flight data, mission goals.  A major disappointment was finding I could never be an astronaut (because I wear glasses), so I became an engineer.   Public support decreased long before the Columbia incident.  Space flight had become mundane; initially there was the "us against them" challenge of getting to the moon before the Soviets, but once that was done most people lost interest.  The last three moon landings were canceled for budget reasons, subsequent flights were so highly technical and scientific that the average person wasn't interested.  And the original allure of the space program, and the vision of the future we had developed, never materialized.  The pushbutton world of the Jetsons never arrived;  the space station, rather than the majestic rotating wheel of science fiction (epitomized in the movie 2001), turned out to be an uninspiring tinkertoy contraption in low orbit.  The expected moon colony wasn't forthcoming, an expedition to Mars would not occur in our lifetime.  For the foreseeable future spaceflight was something reserved for a few dozen highly trained specialists, not for the common man.  There was no exploration involved, which would certainly have stirred interest;  and unlike the past, where any able-bodied man could go to a port city and sign on for an ocean voyage to see new parts of the world, we would never experience more than TV coverage of space walks to repair the Hubble.  For most people the entire space program after the moon landing (and even before for some) was a waste of tax money that could be better spent elsewhere (does no good to point out virtually every major technological advance in the past half century was a direct result of the space program).    I find it a sad commentary that today we have individuals so wealthy they can afford their own private space programs.

Those broadcasts were also a wonderful recruiting tool for the armed forces and also for kids who were tempted to enter math and/or science fields.     IMO anything we can do to wean kids and in fact most of their parents, from TIK TOK and other phone apps is a good thing!!  There are millions of interesting things going on in our world and in other worlds if people would just put their phones down and look around a few minutes every day! 

I miss the days when schools would either let you stay home to watch a launch or they would project the TV in the auditorium for all to watch (yes TV, no computers or internet at that time). I watched every launch from Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the early shuttles. Unfortunately the Columbia incident, the over televised shots of the explosion and the shocked families at Canaveral, accelerated the already decreasing public support for these missions. That was seen by many as the same type of event as the Hindenburg and the Concord crashes. I hope that the the new budding interest in space continues to grow and people can share the joy and wonder I did during those early years.

Looks like this problem has been resolved as MSFS downloads from Flightsim.com no longer trigger an "Unsafe download" warning.

If you're interested in in space missions, you could join Kayamone Sutton's Virtual United States Space Program. The original VUSSP  had 150 members, conducted over 100 unmanned missions and over 20 manned missions. Highly recommended. http://www.vussp.org  

Bombardier Challenger 650 (HB-JWB) Swiss Air Ambulance  landing (jumpy), taxi  (close up) and takeoff at Manises Valencia Airport (VLC) with ATC audio included runway 12  

Hi VP2, the European Space Agency (ESA) is a good site https://www.esa.int I just had a look at YouTube and the handover ceremony featuring Oleg. I couldn't find an English version for his channel, is there one? This vid has English subtitles, which is good (I actually like to hear people speaking in their own language, including Russian) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ0vf0qfHfE

Lufthansa Regional, CRJ-700 beeing pushed back from its Gate in Marseille  ready for its Departure to Munich, Germany. 

NASA TV has some great content. I also like watching what the other Space agencies are up to. If I had a favorite, I'd say Oleg Artemayev's Channel on YT. He's totally low key and shows stuff from the Russian side not usually seen. You're a Space nut... I'm a SpaceFood nut!  

Thanks PhrogPhlyer for the links. I looked at a number of them the other night. Very interesting. On another note, as a space nut, and regular reader of NASA news, just watched a very good press conference with Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Was a nice difference, it started with them arriving in their T38s and was outside on the tarmac. They were very informal, which was refreshing instead of just the 'suits' yakking away. Boeing Starliner first human test flight scheduled to go 6 May.  

In progress...  

This will be long and wordy but first...   @hjwalter Hans, to answer your original question, the only inbuilt mechanism for specifically an image is the computer's graphics engine, which has constantly to resize every texture file in order to create the illusion of distance. BGLs are a different matter and I can imagine that someone has managed to compile one one that does create mips from base textures. Seems redundant though -- the processing power to create mips on the fly and then render them would be exactly the same as simply resizing and rendering the base image.   I won't be at all offended if nobody reads this. I won't know unless some masochist points out a mistake...       @jgf Thank you for adding that. I thought my explanation was reasonably clear but perhaps it wasn't. It could be a language barrier, I suppose.   For anyone who just happens along and has the fortitude, I'll reiterate...   First, image compression.   DXT3 degrades image quality, right from the outset. And it gets worse with every hard save. I'll come back to that.   All compression degrades image quality. Not just game textures and not just the DXT format.   Every time you edit and save one of your photographs as a jpeg the image quality will diminish. Zoom right out from your newly compressed photo and it probably won't look so bad. Zoom in and you will see more of the degradation.   The same thing happens with music (except for a few formats like .flac) though most of our ears can't hear the difference between a wav and an mp3.   Decompressing a compressed image doesn't repair the damage. It is permanent. Converting DXT3 to 888-8 doesn't improve the image quality. I do it to downloads because 1) I'm likely to edit in the future and 2) I'll forget what format it is. I resave downloads as 888-8 to ensure that my future self doesn't mess up.   There is some good news though. Image editing software doesn't actually save the file when you click 'Save'. What it does is make a temporary file of what's essentially metadata comprising the sum of all the editing that you've done. The compression part of the metadata is only applied to the image file itself when you 'Save As' or when you save and close. You can save as often as you like as long as you keep the image open, and only one compression will be done, right at the very end.   DXT images are compressed. 32 bit are not. So, for the same number of pixels, DXT3 uses up much less disk space. They are arguably quicker to load into FS9 just because they are fewer MB in size but I've never noticed a difference, not even on my old XP machine.   On a slight tangent, resizing is also a form of compression: 2048 × 2048 down to 512 × 512 means a file 1/16 of the kB size but the different compression formats we have been discussing don't alter the image dimensions, only the quality.   Second, mip mapping.   It's one of the more interesting aspects of mathematics that just as you can map a piece of a flat image to a point on the surface of an imaginary 3d model (atlas to globe), so you can map a different piece of the same image to the concept of 'further away'.   Referring to the ISS images in my earlier post (which as usual came from Wikipedia), mips don't affect near objects because for close-ups, the highest-res base image is always used.   The explanation for mips being necessary dates back to the 20th century. The size of a building, a tree, an aircraft on your monitor is not 30 metres wide by 40 metres long. Its real size changes as it seems to move closer or further from your virtual viewpoint.   Sometimes the object may be 1000 pixels wide. A few minutes later it could be 30 pixels. Graphics hardware and software have to edit textures to create the illulsion of distance and perspective.   Imagine an FS9 building falling behind you as you taxi past it. As you go by, looking out of your cockpit window, it is a rectangle covering 500 × 500 pixels of your monitor. Taxi onward and look back over your virtual shoulder. The object is now a trapezium 50 pixels tall and 10 pixels wide.   The graphics stuff has to shrink the texture to make it look further away and has to skew it to account for perspective. Shrinking has to be done on a per-pixel basis so that's 262 000 pixels that have to be processed for a 512 × 512 texture. It has to be done for every texture in every frame of your fps. For a 2048 × 2048 it's nearly 4.2 million.   However, if the texture has mips, then much of the work has already been done. While you are near the virtual building, the graphics engine will still select the high-res, unmipped base image in the texture file. As you taxi onward, the graphics engine will select one of the pre-shrunk images from a different piece of the texture file and then only has perhaps 64 × 64 pixels to process. This is the purpose of mip mapping: reducing the load.   Fifteen or more years ago this was absolutely essential: small ram, weak processors, onboard graphics...   Nowadays, small textures like those in FS9 -- a maximum of 2048 × 2048 -- are no trouble for modern equipment and mip mapping is not necessary.   If you have an old PC and you find your framerate dropping then mip mapping textures may help. It's worth being aware that it may not: the framerate could be affected by the number of polygons in the frame, online weather or even by complex systems in the player aircraft. Lots of things affect it.   But... modern PCs don't struggle with unmipped textures in FS9.   D  

MIPs will not affect what you see at close range, they merely reduce graphics resource requirements as the objects get farther away (where you will not notice reduced detail/resolution).  Without MIPs the full size image is loaded regardless of where it is used - imagine the resources required to display all the scenery tiles visible on the screen using 2048x2048 images;  MIPs allow the distant textures to be rendered with 32x32, or smaller, textures.  Same with aircraft, a dozen AI without MIPs are using a lot of resources.   The image degradation referenced above is what happens when repeatedly processing a DXT/DDS image, just like a jpg file it is compressed every time it is saved, and each compression causes loss of quality.  Thus when painting aircraft always edit the original image and save as a new DXT, never edit and save the DXT.