Ed Harrell

Son of the King. Husband, dad, Marine & Retired Soldier. GIS practitioner striving to blend art and science through maps. Roll Tide & Go Braves!

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@JosipFCB93 We could simultaneously host a second WC with the big nice stadiums we didn’t use for this one.

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@CourtAnne1225 @netflix @FreddyLA7 They’d make him a transgendered black they/them.

[Jarrod Worley @JarrodWorley]

@davidmoney72 @Tony_Tsoukalas Other bama fan here. I wish AU loses accreditation and all their student athletes are found academically ineligible and are forced to go play Banana Ball to salvage whatever dignity they have left.

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@JarrodWorley @CourtAnne1225 @davidmoney72 @Tony_Tsoukalas

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@Osint613 He’s really arrogant but I applaud his efforts to make up for it by being even more insufferable.

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@PMacCoon You misspelled soccer.

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

Closing out the day somewhere in the Inside Passage of Alaska. Every time the ship turns, it’s even more magnificent. Being in the Top Sail lounge on the Poesia is just icing on the cake. @MSCCruisesUSA

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@solonerfherder @RobbieDidThat @jrlowry007 @Braves @MLB I love when the fans are the big sound in the park but the Marching Chiefs kicking it off was always cool. Everyone started together and sort of in pitch (I'm an old band guy). It sounded better when everyone understood where to begin.

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@RobbieDidThat @Braves @MLB Amen!

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@sumbolus @JunkScience Or, you can buy a used Tesla of the same age, charge at home so you’re full every morning, get over the air software updates for constant new features for the ability to not have your car catch fire. EVs are 6x less likely to do so.

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@KellyRiddell Please stop calling them progressive. They’re the opposite of that.

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

I just wrote my first note on Substack https://t.co/QeWhteFrsh

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@SPeeblesSports 8+. Competition hasn't exactly been playoff caliber yet but the boys are getting it done handily against the teams they should be beating.

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@CrosbyBaseball @TGreenhutOD These Clingstones have some impressive speed. Very quick and smart base running. This is a fun team and game to watch.

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

Who should I be watching with the Clingstones visiting the Biscuits this week @CrosbyBaseball? The Clingstones’ CF has a cannon that he’s shown off a couple of times tonight.

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@CrosbyBaseball @TGreenhutOD Thanks! That pen looked pretty solid. I didn’t catch a lot of names but I saw the pitching for sure.

[Ed Harrell @ed_harrell]

@RealWashedGamer @TransferPortal @JoeTipton I get what you're saying and agree with the sentiment. But the landscape has changed; they're all professional athletes now. There are softball pitchers in college making more in NIL than 3/4 of MLB players. It's out of control insane.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

NASA pays $100M for Microsoft 365 licensing across the agency. They standardized every system on Microsoft. They put Microsoft Surfaces on the Orion spacecraft as the crew's personal computing devices.

And the first technical crisis of humanity's return to the Moon was Reid Wiseman radioing Houston to say he has two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one works.

Mission Control's response? "With your go, we can remote in and take a look." The same exact workflow your company's IT helpdesk uses when you submit a ticket on a Monday morning. Except the user is traveling at 4,275 mph, 30,000 miles from Earth, and the Wi-Fi situation is considerably worse.

This spacecraft survived hydrogen leaks, helium leaks, a faulty heat shield, and a broken toilet. Outlook broke anyway. The toilet actually got fixed faster.

The real story here is that Microsoft has achieved something no other software company in history can claim: a support ticket from lunar transit. Their enterprise sales team should frame this. "Battle-tested in space" is a positioning statement most B2B companies would mass murder for, and Microsoft accidentally earned it because Outlook crashes everywhere, including orbit.

Outlook remains the only software in human history that performs identically whether you're in a cubicle in Redmond or aboard a spacecraft bound for the Moon. Universally, reliably broken. And we keep buying it anyway.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

We're going back to the fucking moon, that's why.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

Four humans are heading to the Moon right now and the most important detail is one nobody is discussing.

Artemis II lifted off yesterday at 6:35 p.m. EDT from Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center. Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen are the first crew to leave low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972. Over ten days they will fly approximately 4,700 miles beyond the far side of the Moon, setting a new human distance record of roughly 252,000 miles from Earth that has stood since Apollo 13. Victor Glover has already manually piloted Orion for over an hour, the first manual flight of this spacecraft. Splashdown is targeted for April 10 in the Pacific.

The first crewed lunar voyage in 54 years. Historic beyond question.

Now the number nobody wants to say out loud.

NASA’s Inspector General calculated the cost of each of the first four Artemis missions at $4.1 billion per launch. The SLS rocket is fully expendable. Every engine, every tank, every solid booster drops into the ocean or burns up. Nothing comes back. Two days before this launch, SpaceX deployed 148 satellites across two missions in under 24 hours using a booster flying for the 34th time that landed on a droneship 8.5 minutes after liftoff. The propellant cost for that Falcon 9 flight was roughly $200,000.

Artemis II validates the destination. It proves Orion’s life support, heat shield, and navigation in deep space. It tests crew operations through the Van Allen belts and reentry at 25,000 miles per hour through 5,000-degree plasma. That work matters for every mission that follows.

But here is what the mission architecture reveals.

NASA has already restructured the program. Artemis III, originally the lunar landing, has been reduced to a low-Earth-orbit docking test with the Starship Human Landing System in 2027. The crewed surface landing shifts to Artemis IV, targeted for 2028. The vehicle carrying astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface will not be built by NASA. It will be Starship. The same company that launched 165 times last year and deployed 97% of all US spacecraft in Q4 2025.

NASA chose the destination. SpaceX inherited the transport.

The Trump administration’s own budget proposal called SLS “grossly expensive” and directed NASA to evaluate transitioning to “more cost-effective commercial systems.” Artemis IV and V remain funded through the current appropriations cycle. Beyond that, the program faces existential questions that its own government has begun asking publicly.

Meanwhile Musk announced in February that SpaceX will prioritize a self-growing lunar base achievable in under ten years using Starship variants designed exclusively for the Moon. Orbital refueling demo targets June 2026. Uncrewed lunar Starship landing targets 2027. One hundred metric tons to the surface per flight versus Orion’s crew-only capacity.

Artemis II is not the beginning of a new program. It is the final act of expendable deep-space human spaceflight and the opening ceremony of something that costs three orders of magnitude less per kilogram delivered.

Four astronauts are making history at 25,000 miles per hour. The history they are making is not the one most people think.

https://t.co/iOMyZngVQc