puetzk

Mount the microphone/headphones in something like these? http://www.necomimi.com/

You might have to follow through on that "I would cheerfully sacrifice a good deal of social standing" part, though...

Also, the rocket will be falling at its terminal velocity, having lost the rest of its speed to air drag. Even without parachutes (and they don't intend to carry any), that's only ~120 m/s - the upper stage and payload are gone, the 1st stage has big tanks but only a little fuel left, so its density is low. The final burn for propulsive landing only has to cancel that last little bit.

One of the most useful forms of diversity is the "my opponent does not have access to time machine" defense. e.g. use some C compiler for amiga, or 1980's DEC unix, or whatever to bootstrap gcc3 for windows, and use that to bootstrap clang for linux, etc. The odds that hardware and binaries you've had for 30 years could carry a trojan that successfully applies to a compiler that was not written yet, for an architecture that was not designed yet, inserting a trojan for yet another such pair, seem low. Feel free to follow more than one such path if paranoia dictates. When you arrive at the end (some compiler, built with itself), the binaries should all match however you got there, presuming no undefined behavior in the compiler itself. If there is something, fix it.

And better yet if this chosen starting point(s), being old, are also small and simple.