Why Blog?

This blog’s existence is owed, entirely, to my interactions with Dr. Casey Handmer, whose own blog convinced me that to write down your most deeply held beliefs and send them out into the world is the best way to find interesting people. If nothing else, I consider this page to satisfy my obligation to the Cult of Done, the twelfth precept of which reads:

If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

The hope is, of course, that by writing down my thoughts they will stop (or at least slow) their ricocheting inside my mind, and that by putting my emotions to virtual paper I might be somewhat tethered against their tides. We’ll see. Either way, there is some comfort in knowing that some part of yourself is out there, written down, advocating on your behalf, even while you sleep, even after you’re gone, to anyone out there who will bother to listen. In this sense the Voyager probes, with their cryptic hieroglyphs and golden records, are perhaps the greatest blog yet written.

The golden records are a great encapsulation of what I hope to write about here; they are an intersection of technology (spaceflight, principally) and culture (music, art, history), but also of the metaphysical assertions that permit and encourage both to flourish. As I write this my life is materially sustained by the quest to send humanity out into the cosmos, just as it is spiritually sustained by the quest for Truth, moral or otherwise, which seem — although I can not prove it quite yet — to constructively amplify each other.

If Voyager takes the cake for the greatest blog ever written, in my estimation Casey’s is the second.

Casey is easily one of the most magnetic personalities alive, relentlessly genuine, with experience working on everything from gravitational waves to Martian autarky to carbon capture to decoding carbonized ancient Roman scrolls; to give an exhaustive overview would take a very long time. I can not recommend enough that you read his blog, which he regularly updates with new and insightful musings.

I first encountered his writing on, of all places, 4chan (specifically the science board /sci/, even more specifically, following a chain of conversation on that board known as ‘spaceflight general’ or /sfg/). Starting in December 2018, what had previously been sporadic conversation centered on a given rocket launch or some other announcement finally reached critical mass when four rocket launches were all scheduled for the same day (Dec 17th). By the 23rd, the online spaceflight community had gotten wind of SpaceX building – something – at the southern tip of Texas. This marked the beginning of an unbroken chain of conversation that would (by February) be known as Spaceflight General.

The timing of this conversation starting up was uncanny. I was a senior in high school in February of 2018, and on the 6th of that month a friend of mine pushed me to watch the Falcon Heavy Test Flight (a story for a different time). This event kicked off a long chain of decisions that culminated with my tour at SpaceX (then) headquarters in Hawthorne with my college’s rocketry team later that year; if Falcon Heavy had shocked me into an awareness of spaceflight, the Hawthorne tour cemented my decision to pursue making humanity multiplanetary. It just so happened that I toured on December 12th, only 5 days before /sfg/ kicked off. My resultant obsession with learning everything there was to know about spaceflight drove me to many corners of the internet, which is how I came to be on an obscure thread on an obscure board on a disreputable website, at exactly the right time.

I quickly came to understand that the most raw and entertaining discourse was to be found on /sfg/, including many(many) memes. Again, a story for a different time. Every once in a while, but with surprising consistency, the name “Casey” would appear (even today, six-and-a-half years later, he is still a touchstone of the community, if the subject of considerable debate). The consensus then, as it is now, was that Casey was the one voice crying out the writing on the wall to the spaceflight community, primarily through the medium of his blog. It is no small exaggeration to say that his post lampooning the SLS rocket in early 2021 gained him permanent status as a celebrity for the kind of renegade spaceflight enthusiasts who called /sfg/ home. That he wrote this article while being employed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and so at great expense to any long term career within NASA) only heightened the effect.

As luck would have it, the first great break of my professional career would come the same month as the SLS article. On February 3rd, I was extended a summer internship offer at JPL, on the system reliability team (division 5138, for those who are familiar). That summer, I would happen to overlap with Casey during his last few months before he would quit (correctly foreseeing the layoffs to come) to start his own venture. I mustered the courage to reach out on the internal messaging platform and scheduled a call with him.

We covered a surprising range of topics in that half-hour, everything from Mars to zeppelins, but what I was most struck by was how he was exactly the same person as the “Casey” attested to by the words on the blog. It was a compelling that the zany, razor sharp intellect behind that Australian accent matched so closely – it meant that he wore his heart on his sleeve, that he approached the world with a kind of honesty and idealism untarnished by the cynicism of his critics. In another age he would very much match the stereotype of the misunderstood inventor, an Archimedes or a Da Vinci. He even plays organ toccatas on tesla coils! I gained much respect for him over those 30 minutes, and across the rest of the summer absorbed his first and second books on colonizing Mars. They framed well the magnitude of the challenge I wanted to participate in, and I think played an outsized role in sustaining my passion for the Martian dream.

I did not speak to Casey again for almost a year. By the following summer I had graduated, launched (and blew up) the largest rocket yet built by Harvey Mudd College, and accepted an associate engineering position at my dream company. Emboldened by my new company email address, I reached out to Casey once again, and after another lively conversation exchanged personal contact information. I would go on to accept a full time position at Starbase later that fall, and Casey comes out to visit once every few months. Now, much more than just some blogger, he’ll offer career advice or reach out to check in on how I’m doing. I am exceedingly grateful for his perspective.

When he most recently came out to Starbase, he insisted (again) that I start a blog. Given how impactful his blog has been to myself and the community of spaceflight enthusiasts, it seems prudent to copy his example. If you find value in the things that I write, I invite you to reach out, say hello, gently point out where you think I’ve gone astray or help me place down another plank or two towards the Truth. I’d be very grateful!

Edward