The fortnight ahead holds the first attempt to launch American astronauts from American soil since the Shuttle retired in 2011, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Demo-2, Bob and Doug (the actual names; the universe casts well), scheduled Wednesday from pad 39A itself. Nine years of gap, bridged by the company this archive watched land its first booster through a haze of my own tears. Florida’s weather forecast is hostile all week, so I’m pre-registering the healthy outcome: if they scrub with humans aboard, that’s the system working (the inverse of the certification-shortcut file; a launch culture that treats schedule pressure as a first-class hazard; “the rocket doesn’t care about your press availability” is the healthiest sentence in aerospace). The whole locked-down planet could use this launch, which is precisely the pressure the scrub discipline exists to ignore.
Spotify signed Joe Rogan to a reported $100M exclusive, the podcast wars’ Netflix moment: the open-RSS podcast ecosystem (the last major open protocol standing, the one Google Reader’s ghost haunts) now faces the walled-garden capital that closed everything else. The pattern is so familiar this archive could file the entry pre-written: exclusive content, platform lock-in, creator dependency, enshittification curve. Logging the opening move and the sigh.
Work dispatch, staff-flavored: ran our first fully-remote quarterly planning, the async-RFC discipline meeting its boss fight. Verdict: documents scale where meetings don’t, but disagreement needs synchronous bandwidth. We now write async, decide async where consensus exists, and reserve video for the genuine conflicts, which turn out to be ~15% of decisions and 85% of the value of talking. The ratio is the finding. Institutionalizing it.
TIL: launch-commit criteria, the formalized go/no-go poll where any station can stop the countdown without justification beyond their data. “Anyone can pull the andon cord, and pulling it is celebrated,” Toyota, NASA, and the incident-response culture this whole archive is secretly about, converging on one protocol.