One Class In High School That Changed My Life – And I Almost Didn’t Take It

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Old photo of a classroom of girls sitting at desks typing on typewriters. They girls are all wearing school uniforms and the walls are vary sparsely decorated.

It’s funny how decisions you may make in the moment can affect the course of your life.

It was the fall of 1984 and I was signing up for classes for my last semester at my high school in southern Connecticut. I had one open course slot and I had to sign up for some class. I’d completed all my required courses and could sign up for any course I wanted.

So after some deliberation, I signed up for “typing”. This made sense in my brain since I’d been playing with computers since 1977 when the first Apple II came out and one of my best friends got one. Later I got my own Commodore 64, and at the high school I helped out in the computer labs that were full of Apple IIe’s.

It seemed to me that typing might be something to learn. 🤔

BUT… this was 1984/1985 in a US high school. The only people who took “typing classes” were the girls who were expecting to become secretaries. 🤯 Looking back, it’s kind of fascinating now, but there was this clear gender divide. Typing was NOT a class that boys normally took at my school.

So there I was… in a room full of desks with IBM Selectric typewriters on them. The only boy. Me and 20+ girls sitting there typing jjjjjjjjjjjjj and fffffffff a zillion times until we could finally work our way up to such phrases as “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and go on from there. Typing and typing and typing for the five months or so of the semester. Typing so much that we could “touch type” and be able to be looking at something completely different while typing on our typewriters. Doing speed tests and accuracy tests and more.

In the perfect clarity of hindsight, it turned out to be one of the smartest things I ever did!

I would go on to the University of New Hampshire where I got involved in the early Internet, as well as earlier networks like BITNET, EcoNet, etc. I would write millions of email messages, thousands and thousands of blog posts, a number of books, many reports and documents… and many, many lines of programming code in so many different languages.

I would go on to teach electronic publishing using Framemaker… and then develop courseware… and help people create web pages using HTML. Several of my jobs involved writing extensive sets of documentation, or later rapidly developing draft documents for Internet standards.

Because of that typing class, I was well-prepared for the USENET flamewars… for long debates on email lists… for being able to just spew out blog posts, press releases, speeches, or whatever else was needed.

Typing has been a critical component of the success I’ve had over the past 40 years… it turned out to be perhaps the single most useful class I took in high school!

And I almost didn’t… it was just tossed in at the last minute because I needed to fill a slot! 🤣

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons – History Trust of South Australia, circa 1945 – not my actual school.. I’m not THAT old! 😃

A photo showing a lake with mountains in the background. In the foreground are several "dragon boats", which are large, canoe-like boats with 20 people in them paddling. Behind the boats there is a beach with tents and people visible on it.

A Livestream of Dragon Boats – and the magic of the Internet!

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This weekend I was reminded again of just how amazing this Internet we’ve all built together really is! There I was at 6:00am in my house in Vermont … drinking my cup of tea and watching my wife and her team compete in dragon boat races some 3,700 miles (~ 6,000 km) away in France. I could see them paddling hard in their boats. I watched multiple boats capsize! (Thankfully not hers.) I was caught up in the drama and just watching all these many boats full of breast cancer survivors competing against each other.[1]

It’s 2026 and for much of the 75% of the world who has Internet connectivity, we’ve gotten used to live streams. They’re pretty much everywhere! Most social media sites support live streams. YouTube of course does. Twitch is built around livestreaming. There are zillions of shopping services doing live streams of products. Many of the video streaming services support live sessions. And even people who still watch the regular old TV have gotten used to news programs having people streaming in from all over the world.

But when I found myself frustrated with the lack of audio as they had some technical difficulties[2], I could feel my blood pressure rising. And as I joined in on comments on the event’s Facebook page noting that the audio wasn’t working… I found myself pausing.

Wait… I said to myself… isn’t it amazing that this actually works as well as it does??

I mean… the people doing the streaming were taking a live video feed from a DRONE following the boats on a lake in France, doing some kind of local mixing to put on the titles, lower-thirds, etc., and then sending that off to YouTube. The stream probably hit local YouTube servers in France where it was then sent across YouTube’s streaming infrastructure.

In my case that meant the stream went across some subsea cable to presumably some data center in the US where it would then go out across YouTube’s CDN until it eventually crossed Burlington Telecom’s network to land in my house, where it actually had one final step to go across WiFi to my laptop where i was watching. (And yes, I’m simplifying as there were many other pieces and networks involved.)

And all this happened… within fractions of a second 🤯!

Or maybe it was a second or two… I don’t actually know or care. The point is that I was watching these live races from across an ocean. And other family members were watching from other parts of the USA.

And teams participating in the event were from much farther away… for instance from Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. And given that there were 4,500 paddlers total, I’m sure some number of supporters were watching from there. The New Zealanders were very literally on the opposite side of the world!

And… … it worked! [3]

In places like where I live where we have strong, solid Internet access (and also solid electricity), it’s so easy to just take all this for granted. Of course it will work! We just assume that the Internet will be all around us, just like air. And… most of the time… we’re right!

But sometimes we need to just pause and reflect for a moment… and step back in our minds 30 or 40 years .. and think how MAGICAL this would all seem to someone from that era!

We live in an amazing time!

[1] And admittedly being completely caught up in the amazing drone footage! In my loooonng list of things I want to play with is to use drones for livestreaming…

[2] I know a guy in Brooklyn, New York, who does amazing live streaming and would never have let a live stream go live like this without audio! 😃

[3] With the exception of not having audio for a period of time, but they did get the audio back working again.

Image credit: A screenshot I took of the IBCPC live stream.

My Themes for 2026 – And Returning to Writing

A mind map on a gray background showing a white box with 2026 in the middle of it. On the right side are three lines going out of the box, with a word on each line. The first line is blue with the word "Health". The second line is orange with the word "Resilience". The third line is purple with the word "Hope".

Following a practice I’ve been doing for the past 17 years (see list), my first post of 2026 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles.

This year they are a re-ordered version of last year’s words: Health, Resilience, and Hope.

Health

This is my perennial theme… but I MUST make some changes this year and prioritize my health. I’m 14 pounds heavier than I was one year ago, and my blood pressure has been inching up more. If I want to be around long term, I’ve GOT to make some changes!

Resilience

As I talked about last year, “resilience” is a theme coming up in both my personal life and through the work I do at the Internet Society. Expect me to write more about this on various different levels.

Hope

As bleak or chaotic as things may be, I think we must choose hope “as a daily, gritty act of resistance and resilience”. There are people working on ideas and solutions for many challenges we have. There are people working to blunt the impact of extreme policies. We need to celebrate and support this work – and do more ourselves. That is MY continued goal for this year, as it was last year – to keep highlighting these hopeful stories, and to create some of my own as well.

These are my themes for 2026.. let’s see what happens!

A Note About My Writing

You’ll notice that I did NOT write any other posts on this DanYork.com site since last January. And if you look at my danyork.me aggregator site, you’ll see that I really didn’t write anywhere else, either!

For most of 2025, my role at the Internet Society was supporting our President and CEO, with first her communications and then since May 2025 as her Chief of Staff. The role was very intense and left me little time to do other writing – but even more so I was very aware of my close proximity to the CEO, and I didn’t want any of my writing to potentially reflect back on our CEO. I didn’t want anything I wrote personally to be viewed as potentially coming from our CEO or reflecting her views.

To minimize any potential confusion, I chose to go silent and not publish personal blog posts, podcast episodes, newsletters, or anything else. I was never asked to do this by our CEO or anyone else, and I don’t know if anyone there even noticed. I just felt it was best for me in my role.

That role is now changing as I go into 2026. I’m moving into a different role heading up a new project. We will be hiring a new Chief of Staff, and that person will be taking over the duties I had with our CEO. And so with all the changes, I feel that I can resume the writing and other content creation that I used to do. So you should see more writing from me in the months ahead!

My Themes for 2025

3-words-2025.jpgFollowing a practice I’ve been doing for the past 16 years (see list), my first post of 2025 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles.

This year they are: Resilience, Hope, and Health.

Resilience

Over the past year or so, and particularly over the past six months, it’s become increasingly clear to me that right now a focus for me needs to be around the general area of “resilience” on a number of different levels. 

We’re in a time when extreme weather events ARE increasing – people are dying or being displaced by the thousands or millions. We’re in a time when extreme politics are increasing. We have a changing administration in the US, of course, but we’re seeing extreme governments come to power all around the world. Pick a continent… and there are changes happening there. New viruses are floating around (and the US looks to be poised to dramatically decrease our ability to respond).

There’s a lot of change going on – and a lot of uncertainty.

Of course, given my work, I’m interested in Internet resilience, something the Internet Society, my employer, is very focused on. But I’ve come to understand that Internet resilience depends upon electrical resilience, something I’ve written about at length. There’s also a need for resilience in our access to content, in our transportation, in our housing… and so much more.

And it’s not just at a personal level – we need community resilience. We need to strengthen our local connections, know more about our neighbors, build mutual aid networks, and generally help figure out how we can all get through all this.

I’m taking some actions in my own life, which I’ll write about on my sites. I’m planning to write a series of issues of my own “A View from the Crow’s Nest” newsletter  on the theme of “building resilience” – you are welcome to subscribe! You can also expect this theme to come up in my writing and speaking for the Internet Society… and perhaps some other venues as well.

Hope

I do think that we’re in for some tough times in the months and years ahead. The politics can look bleak for many people… but even putting politics aside, the extreme weather events are effecting more of us. Reports on the state of the climate are dire. 

It’s easy to “doomscroll” and get lost in despair.

As I wrote about last January 1, we can’t do that. As bleak or chaotic as things may be, I think we must choose hope “as a daily, gritty act of resistance and resilience”.

There are people working on ideas and solutions for many challenges we have. There are people working to blunt the impact of extreme policies. We need to celebrate and support this work – and do more ourselves.

That is MY goal for this year – to keep highlighting these hopeful stories, and to create some of my own as well.

Health

This is my perennial theme, but as I noted last year, I’ve had to make some changes in my life – and I need to continue those changes. The good news is that I’m making some positive gains: I’ve lost 23 pounds since last January 1, and my blood pressure is down closer to a normal level. Largely this is due to increasing daily exercise (walking 2-4 miles), lowering my sodium intake, and trying to make better food choices. I’ve still got some work to do… and I NEED to do it.

These are my themes for 2025.. let’s see how the year goes!

Celebrating 20 Years as a Wikipedia Editor

a pink-ish box with 2004 in big letters on the left side and then on the right side the text 'I have been editing Wikipedia since 2004-04-21, twenty years ago'

Today is a special anniversary for me. It was 20 years ago that I set up an account and first made an edit to Wikipedia! On that day I became a “Wikipedian”… although I’m not sure if that name was being used yet. Wikipedia had only been launched in January 2001, so it was a VERY different world in those days.

With the complete transparency of Wikipedia, I can of course go back and see what my earliest edits were. It’s fun to scroll down the list. Amusingly, my very first edit would be frowned upon today. I added the URL for my employer at the time, Mitel, to what was then a very sparse article with five paragraphs of text with no sources or references. (Compare that to today’s article for Mitel.) Today this would be considered a “COI edit” as I had a “conflict of interest” and per the “WP:COI guidelines” it would be recommended that I not make this edit directly (although it was just adding something factual in the form of a URL, so other editors may allow it).

But back in 2004, those were still the very early days when everyone was still trying to figure out what this Wikipedia thing was all about. The norms and conventions for things such as WP:COI hadn’t yet been developed.

The only other edit I made that first year was that same day when I first created my “user page” with one sentence linking to the other sites where I wrote. (How many people remember Advogato?😀) Twenty years later, that user page looks MUCH different!

Then in January 2005 I started creating and editing pages around Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption and later in the year about.. Canadian food! 🤣 (We were living in Ottawa, Ontario, at that time.) And then a whole bunch of other pages, many of which are still in Wikipedia 20 years later, although substantially edited by others since that time.

After that, I didn’t really do a whole lot of editing. In the first 15 years (2004-2019) I made a grand total of 146 edits.

And then… came the COVID pandemic.

As one of the ways I dealt with my own mental health during that time, I started livestreaming Wikipedia editing to Twitch! 🤣 (Which I haven’t done lately, but will probably do tonight just to celebrate the anniversary.)

Every. Single. Day!  For most of a year-and-a-half! 🤯

You can see this clearly in one of the tools available to see contributions from Wikipedia editors:

Dyork-wikipedia-yearly-edits

You can see there was even a year (2008) when I didn’t make a single edit, and one year (2012) where I made only one single edit.

And then… BOOM… 2020 hit and there I was!

What’s interesting about 2020 and 2021 is the salmon-colored block on the right. This was what is called a “template” and was where I was manually copying in the daily data from the Vermont Department of Health to update the chart that appears on the side of the article about the COVID-19 pandemic in Vermont. Every single day. Later in 2021 someone thankfully automated that so that it pulled the data direct from the Vermont Department of Health’s system, but for all that initial time it was a completely manual process – and was part of what I did each night on my Twitch livestream.

With that burst of activity during the pandemic, it caused me to dive deep into Wikipedia and learn about parts of the site and community that I had never really engaged with, and that in many cases hadn’t even been around in the earlier days when I first got involved. I learned a huge amount.

And out of that I became endlessly fascinated with how the whole Wikipedia community – and broader Wikimedia movement – has evolved, and I continue that fascination today. As you can see from the chart, I’m continuing to edit in 2024 and plan to keep on going.

In fact, I’m seriously thinking about bringing back the livestreaming. (Follow me on Twitch to be notified or over on Mastodon where I’ll post if I’m streaming.)

Wikipedia has definitely changed a huge amount over time, from being a site that was initially dismissed and derided, to today being one of the sites where you can go for well-sourced information. Sure, it definitely has its quirks and problems, but overall I believe it’s definitely a positive force in these times when we are so challenged for good information.

Given all the changes that are happening with the way we find and consume information (thinking of generative AI in particular), it will be interesting to see how Wikipedia evolves over the next 20 years!

Meanwhile, there are articles to edit and users to welcome… 😀🎉

An companion podcast episode is available at:

Should I Stay (In) or Go (Out) Now? The Vermont Eclipse Dilemma

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The Vermont Eclipse Dilemma: do we leave our houses and go out and enjoy all the eclipse-related festivities? Or do we just stay at home and leave all the events to the 534,873,937 people that are expected to arrive here to visit?  (Not the actual number, but that’s what it feels like according to the media articles!🤣)

In case you weren’t aware, there’s a solar eclipse happening on this coming Monday, April 8, 2024. And we here in northwestern Vermont are right in the path of “totality”. For about 3 minutes on Monday afternoon, the moon will completely block the sun. It’s supposed to be amazing by those who have seen it!

And … ABC News and other sources have declared the Burlington, VT, area to be THE best place in the USA to view the eclipse! 😲🤯😱

Now, the “path of totality” stretches from western Mexico up through Texas, Ohio, and on up through northern New York (including Niagra Falls), northern Vermont and New Hampshire, and then through Maine into New Brunswick and maritime Canada.

Everywhere along that path, hotel and AirBnB rooms sold out months ago. You can’t book any rooms unless you want to pay obscene amounts of money. Events are sold out. Everything’s sold out! People have been planning trips for years, in some cases. And with all the media attention, so many people are expected to drive to the path of totality on Monday.

Here’s the thing… we here in Vermont were expecting to see some visitors, but in early April it’s usually cloudy and rainy. The early predictions were for all of that. If you really wanted to see the eclipse, the smart approach was to head to Texas where the chances of sun were SIGNIFICANTLY higher!

Still, we have prepared. Our schools are closed on Monday. Many businesses have encouraged people who can work remotely to do so. Everyone has been encouraged to do all their grocery shopping before the weekend. Big signs on the highways are telling everyone to STAY HOME if at all possible!

You see, we’re a rural state. We only have around 646,000 people in total.  And about 150,000 of those people live up in the northwest corner when I live. We have only two Interstate highways: I-91 running up the east side, and I-89 going diagonally northwest across the top half of the state.

Outside of those two interstates, almost all of our other roads are your regular old two lane roads (one going one direction, one going the other). Sure, we sometimes might have sections with two lanes on both sides. Sometimes we’ll throw in a passing lane or a turning lane in the middle. We might even have small stretches of divided highway.

But most of our roads are small. We don’t need them to be huge.

And so… what happens when 10s of thousands – or maybe 100s of thousands! – of people come up to visit? On roads that are really more for hundreds of people? (If that!)

Yeah… that’s why we closed our schools and told everyone to stay home!

And of course, with the weather being as unpredictable as it is, current forecasts for Texas are that it will be CLOUDY on Monday! 🤦‍♂️

And we… are expected to have bright, sunny, clear skies! 🤯

Hence the news from ABC and other places that Vermont is the place to be! 

Add to this the fact that we’re only a few hours drive for people down in Massachusetts and even Pennsylvania and New York… there truly are 100s of thousands of people who could make the drive.

So we’re ready… we have so many different events planned. Restaurants that usually are closed on Monday are all opening up. Massive events are planned for the Burlington waterfront, the airport, and in so many other places. We’ll welcome you all up here warmly!

But for Vermonters we do have the dilemma… do we actually go out and join in any of the festivities? Or do we leave those for the visitors … and just watch the eclipse from our yards? 

Either way… we’ve got our eclipse glasses and we’re excited to experience this once-in-a-lifetime event!

Bring it on!

P.S. Good luck to all the visitors trying to get home on Monday after the eclipse… did I mention about our small roads and only two Interstate highways?  Have you considered staying until Tuesday? 😀

1000 Days of Journaling with Day One

IMG_7813Back in June 2021, Automattic announced that they were acquiring Day One, a journaling app. I had never heard of Day One, but being a strong WordPress user I paid attention to news from Automattic. Given that so much of Automattic’s tools are aimed at public writing and publishing (ex WordPress, Tumblr), I found the addition of the private publishing of Day One to be curious.

I investigated… and rapidly became intrigued.

I liked the fact that it seamlessly worked across all my Apple devices and systems. As a security geek, I loved that all the journals are end-to-end encrypted so that not even Automattic can see them. I enjoyed how I could easily add photos, audio, and video into posts. I was amused that there was an Apple Watch app that let you add audio (which I’ve used maybe twice, but it’s fun that it’s there).

Pretty soon Day One just became an integral part of my daily life.

Today marks 1,000 days straight of using the app. BUT… unlike Duolingo where a “streak” is a gamified way of keeping you involved, this streak is purely a recognition of how much the app has become woven into what I do. Unlike Duolingo, I wasn’t trying to keep a streak going… I was just constantly using the app.

To be clear, I haven’t been writing brilliant pieces of text every day for 1,000 days. When you pay for a Day One subscription, as I do, you can create as many different “journals” as you want.

And so for me, Day One has become a chronological note-keeping database. I do have a “Journal” where I occasionally write down thoughts, poems, ideas, etc. But I also have journals for:

  • Gratitude – I do keep a daily gratitude journal of things I am grateful for
  • Health – Notes about medical appointments, blood pressure, weight, exercise
  • Games – Records of Wordle (yes, I still play daily!) and other games
  • Clothing – What I wear during the work week (mostly so that I don’t show up at my weekly Rotary Club meeting wearing the exact same thing as I did last week! 🤣)
  • House – Notes about changes, updates, repairs, etc, on our house
  • Cars – Records of oil changes, repairs, and other aspects of car ownership
  • Home IT – Updates about things I’ve done on our home systems
  • Instagram – It automagically pulls in any Instagram photos I post so that I have my own local copy
  • And several other journals for notes about family and other life aspects

You can see from the list why it’s never a struggle for a “streak” to happen… the app is just woven into the fabric of what I do every single day.

I’ve also started using it for journals for focused activities. For example, I recently spent a week in Honduras on a service trip. I created a separate journal, and while there spent time each capturing my memories of what I did during the day, and adding photos and videos so that I could remember when I got back home. This worked out well, and by virtue of the new “Shared Journals” feature, I was able to share this journal with my daughter who also accompanied me. As I started using the app more intentionally in Honduras, it was fun to see that it created a map of where I was when I posted each post, so I could geographically see where I had been.

I’ve also started a journal up for the 12-week Climatebase Fellowship that I began yesterday. Again, to capture notes and thoughts while in the middle of that focused work.

I also very much enjoy the “On This Day” aspect that shows you want entries you made across your various journals over the years. It’s a fun and interesting way to reflect back and understand where you were and where you have come from over time.  (There are even more features of Day One that I haven’t played with at all.)

But wait, you might say… didn’t I write about moving note taking from Evernote to Obsidian? How does Obsidian fit in here?

The answer is that I’m using both. Day One is what I use every day for chronological notes. It’s my daily diary of life. It’s where I record thoughts I randomly have, or what I’m grateful for, or photos of what happened on a particular day. It’s also where I check to see when was the last time I got an oil change for the truck – or what clothes I wore to Rotary last Wednesday 😀.

Obsidian is what I use for more long-term or structured notes and storage. For example, when I was taking French classes, all my notes are there. I have a note with the various biographies that I use so that if I need a bio to submit to a conference, I can rapidly get one. I have notes with abstracts for various talks. I have “link dumps” of research I’ve done on various topics.

I use Obsidian for things that I want to retrieve based on topic or search term, rather than date.

I could use Obsidian for the daily diary aspect. I know some people do. The reality is that I was already using Day One when I discovered Obsidian, and so I already had solved the chronological note taking in my daily life.

And so here I am… 1,000 days of using an app… every…. single…. day!

If you haven’t checked out Day One, I encourage you to do so. For me, it’s an amazing app that helps me every day with capturing what is going on in my life, and in my thinking.

I’m Doing It Again… Getting Sucked Into Consuming Vs Creating

IMG_4021I’m doing it again… instead of writing and creating new posts in the morning, I’m sitting there scrolling through Mastodon… or reading the latest news on Memeorandum or Techmeme… or jumping into work email or Slack before I really need to. And sooner or later, any of the “free” time I had is gone and it’s time to start the work day. The time has melted away.

Consumption has triumphed over creation, yet again.

That’s no way to get back into writing more. That’s no way to develop habits of consistent writing.

And yet it is so incredibly easy to fall into that pattern… again and again and again….

So today I’ll write this small post of self-reflection to start yet again. Here’s to yet another attempt to break that pattern and build newer, stronger habits! 

——

Image credit: a generated image from Leonardo.ai

The Joys Of Being Your Own IT Department – And Of DNS and RSS

Tonight I was looking at my danyork.me aggregation site and I was confused… why were my posts from my danyork.com site NOT appearing in the master list? I *knew* I had written there.

Of course my initial thought was some problem with the RSS feed. Yep! 

On danyork.me I’m using the older FeedWordPress plugin for WordPress that does RSS syndication. A quick look told me that the feed it was supposed to be pulling in was:

https://www.danyork.com/rss.xml

Except… that was showing up as invalid XML. 🤷‍♂️

Screenshot of W3C RSS Validator showing that the feed is invalid

After some trial and error, I discovered that… I need to drop the “www” on the feed! 🤦‍♂️ If I instead use this:

https://danyork.com/rss.xml

Then… everything works!

Screenshot of the W3C Feed validator with the feed successfully validating

I made the update to the FeedWordPress settings, forced an “Update Now” and … 🎉 …. the posts started appearing again at danyork.me!

So it’s somewhere between a DNS issue (cue “it’s always DNS!”) and a web hosting issue. My DanYork.com site is one of the ones that I still have running on the old TypePad platform…. and THAT  is where I suspect the issue lies.

danyork.dreamhosters.com/ is just a CNAME pointing over to lodestar.typepad.com, where TypePad is then redirecting it to my specific blog. However, if I do a ‘curl’ for the www URL, I can see I get a plain HTML page that looks like it may be trying to do a meta refresh. If I do a ‘curl’ on the non-www URL, I get the correct RSS feed.

However, in an amusing bit of 🤦‍♂️, the RSS feed says that it should be at “danyork.dreamhosters.com/”:

<atom10:link xmlns:atom10="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" rel="self" href="https://danyork.dreamhosters.com//rss.xml" type="application/rss+xml" />

But of course that won’t work.

So… something for me to dive into at some point and figure out.

Maybe I should call my IT team!  Oh, wait… that’s … me! 🤦‍♂️

 

ULA’s Successful Vulcan Centaur Rocket Launch Is Good News

Vulcan centaur launch 776

As I was posting about on Mastodon, early this morning United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully launched their new Vulcan Centaur rocket into space from their launch site in Florida. The rocket carried the first US moon lander (Peregrine) from a private company (Astrobiotic), as well as a whole range of science experiments, part of the remains of several people, and even a collection of stories from writers.

Some great coverage is available from ArsTechnica, SpaceNews, SpaceFlight Now, and Space.com (many photos).

The key point is that the rocket launched successfully!

As I wrote about back in my November 3rd issue of my “A View From the Crow’s Nest” newsletter, we are currently in this strange spot where there has been only ONE launch provider – globally – that has been consistently launching rockets… SpaceX.

And SpaceX has done AMAZING work! In 2023 they launched an incredible 98 rockets (96 Falcon 9s, 2 Starships) from four different launch locations. That’s a launch cadence that is truly amazing.

But as amazing as the SpaceX team is, it’s a bit scary from a resilience point-of-view to have only one company consistently launching systems into space. It would be good for all of us to have more competition.

And meanwhile, ULA in 2023 launched a grand total of… *3* rockets.

Yes, 3!

Largely because ULA is running out of its Atlas and Delta rockets and has been betting everything on this new Vulcan Centaur. However, as the Wikipedia page notes, the Vulcan Centaur has been in the works since 2014. It was supposed to first launch 5 years ago in 2019… and then it was delayed… and delayed… and delayed… and delayed… until today!

So it is great to see this successful launch. Hopefully this will lead to many more.

But we’ll have to see.

Right now ULA has only booked six launches over the rest of 2024 … while SpaceX is reportedly shooting for 144 launches! ULA could of course book more, particularly now that they’ve had a successful launch. But they are still far away from the volume and cadence that SpaceX is achieving.

And, as Eric Berger wrote in an excellent piece over at ArsTechnica, it’s not clear where ULA is heading as a company. There seems to be a good bit of tension between the company and its Boeing and Lockheed owners. And the owners are also putting the company up for sale. (The Wikipedia article about ULA is a good read.)

The good news for now is that the Vulcan Centaur’s first launch was successful. Hopefully their next will be as well, and they can start launching more and more satellites and systems.

Meanwhile, SpaceX will keep launching and launching and launching… 

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Image credit: Tweet from ULA