The title isn’t entirely true – there are a few very unimportant entries which had been deleted a while back which are lost. They had no value anyway, unlike the entries I restored this evening.
If you have been following this site for long enough or know me to any real degree you will know I’m quite the fan of space and rocketry. For a time a very large portion of this sites content was me covering space news (mainly launches) and history.
This happened until I reached a bit of a breaking point with the community. Suffice it to say a certain upstart company by the name of SpaceX which, I will fully acknowledge provides a fine enough service, cultivated a fan base which has effectively ruined space for me. It is impossible to have a conversation about current topics and many historic ones without the company being brought up as some kind of savior to the world of rocketry, and that anything else is a complete waste of time and resources.
To put it another way, a childish fanboy cult formed around the company, their rockets and services, and the founder who shall remain nameless. It caused me such stress, even via just association, that I had to take a massive break from the subject. I cut off writing projects mid-series, and beyond covering the Apollo 11 50th anniversary, I’ve not written too much about space since that time, in late 2018.
This was after years of buildup and, as a way to wash my hands of the entire situation, I deleted virtually all of the content related to that particular company from this site — images included.
Over the past few months I’d considered the idea of, for completeness, bringing these articles back. Images be damned, I don’t want those hogging up my server space, but the text — my words on the subject, both from when I was a fan of the group to my unfinished rants on what actually was the breaking point — I felt recently that the content should be brought back from the digital grave for what value they may have to the reader.
Consider them sort of in cold storage — in an archive state far more dead than any other entry still published, but not so dead as to be hidden from the world as they had been.
I needed the time to relax and, with the recent changes in my life over the past year, I’ve come to terms with the stress (as, it would seem, many have, as the “cult of SpaceX” has begun to be countered, finally) and it just makes sense to me to restore this data as a part of the healing process. It’s entries from 2, 3, 4 years ago. I’ve moved past it all, but I prefer not to erase history.
In short, it documents my honest feelings at the time about any given subject, and is certainly, when one thinks about it, the essence of blogging.
More to come, as always.
