🚨⛑ Status Check

It's good to take a step back and check-in with the big picture every once in awhile. Recently, our ratio of consume⇆create has been out of whack. The last few years took a large mental toll so we consumed way more and created less.

This year, we've spent an overabundance of time creating. From top-secret projects we wish we could talk about, to umpteen prototype iterations, to things that straight up got rejected, we've been busy!

From the outside, people will only ever see the finished product, never the 1,000 that didn't work! But we have some exciting things on the horizon that we think you're going to love.

Everyone needs a good consume⇆create ratio and we're constantly balancing ours. We consume in order to get ideas, but create in order to implement.

🔗🧐 Q1 Writing

We’ve made a publishing plan. It is designed to have some sort of cadence to our publishing. A quarterly newsletter (like what you’re reading right now), a different monthly newsletter (you can join if you’re not following), regular posts on social media (Twitter and LinkedIn) and articles and weeknotes.

Here are all 5 articles we published in Q1 in case you missed them:

02021 Omnibus:
https://optional.is/required/2022/01/01/02021-omnibus/

Pool Numbers:
https://optional.is/required/2022/01/12/pool-numbers/

02021 Annual Report:
https://optional.is/required/2022/01/25/02021-annual-report/

Hot Chocolate Teabags:
https://optional.is/required/2022/02/22/hot-chocolate-teabags/

Link Rot:
https://optional.is/required/2022/03/09/link-rot/

⸻

All Weeknotes are available as a category on the website:
https://optional.is/required/category/weeknotes

The newsletters are also archived online. If you ever miss something, you can read about it here:
https://optional.is/newsletter/

💫🛰 Reorbitted satellite

This is a tale of an independent, crowdfunded group from 02014 that tried to capture an abandoned NASA satellite and return it to its original mission! But the story starts 35 years earlier.

The International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explorer launched in 01978 to study the solar wind, but in the mid-01980s it was diverted to chase after two comets.

This intrepid spacecraft had lots of firsts. It was the first to enter a halo orbit at a gravity stable Lagrange point and the first to enter into the tail of a comet. First, Comet Giacobini-Zinner and then a year later, Halley's Comet.

The long decommissioned satellite was due to pass Earth again in 02014. This brought out the interests of a crowdfunded group that wanted to try to re-establish a connection. Together with NASA, they reverse-engineered 35+-year-old radio telemetry equipment to try to make contact. They hoped the satellite could be put back into orbit of the original mission. Unfortunately, they found a critical issue with the fuel controls. The ISEE-3 is out there spinning somewhere in space.

You can listen to the NPR story at the time:
Space Thief Or Hero? One Man's Quest To Reawaken An Old Friend (https://www.npr.org/2014/03/18/289628696/space-thief-or-hero-one-mans-quest-to-reawaken-an-old-friend)

You can read more about the history of the satellite and how the Smithsonian institute owns it (somewhere in space).
Saving a space probe: Private team seeks to revive abandoned NASA spacecraft
(http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-052214a-isee3-reboot-project.html)

🏢 🕰 Office Hours

Over the last year, we’ve made use of people’s gracious open office hours. We’ve booked sessions with people we admire and had some amazing and informative chats.

Our open office hours are:

• Monday evenings: 21-22:00 UTC for the Americas
• Friday mornings: 9-11:00 UTC for Europe

Hopefully, we’ll be able to reconnect with more old friends, meet new folks, and have more interesting and engaging conversations.

Merch