Sherrie Rose ★

NASA's Artemis Il mission is scheduled to launch no earlier than April 1, 2026. The crew - Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot), Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen (CSA) - will fly the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft on a ~10-day lunar flyby. This marks the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.

26 March 1953. In a huge medical breakthrough, US medical researcher Dr Jonas Salk announced that he had created the first polio vaccine. Polio cases fell from 58,000 per year in 1952 to 6,000 by 1958. Salk’s vaccine was replaced by a new one developed by Albert Sabin in 1962.

Jensen Huang just reverse-engineered why Elon Musk operates at a speed no one on the planet can match. Three traits. The first is deletion. Huang: “He has the ability to question everything to the point where everything’s down to its minimal amount.” Most engineers solve problems by adding. Musk solves them by subtracting. Every part. Every process. Every assumption that survived because no one had the nerve to kill it. He picks it up. Asks if it’s load-bearing. If the answer is anything less than absolutely, it is gone. Not simplified. Not optimized. Removed. What survives is the skeleton. The bare physics of the problem. Nothing between intent and execution. Huang said it plainly. As minimalist as you could possibly imagine. And he does it at system scale. Not at a product level. Not at a department level. Across entire companies. Entire industries. Entire supply chains. He strips a rocket the same way he strips a meeting. Down to the load-bearing walls and nothing else. The second is presence. Huang: “He is present at the point of action. If there’s a problem, he’ll just go there and show me the problem.” Not a Slack message. Not a report filtered through four layers of people who weren’t there when it broke. He walks to the failure. Stands over it. Puts his hands on it. Most executives have never seen the actual problem their company is trying to solve. They have seen slides about it. Read summaries of it. Formed opinions about it in rooms that are nowhere near it. Musk stands over the broken hardware and does not leave until it works. That collapses the distance that buries most organizations. The gap between something breaking and the person with authority to fix it actually understanding what broke. In most companies, that gap is weeks. For Musk, it is hours. The third is the one that bends everyone around him. Huang: “When you act personally with so much urgency, it causes everybody else to act with urgency.” Every supplier has a hundred customers. Every vendor has a dozen priorities. Every manufacturer has a backlog stretching months into the future. Musk makes himself the top of every single one of those lists. Not by demanding it. By demonstrating it. When the CEO shows up at your facility at midnight. When he is moving faster than your own internal team. When his timeline makes yours look like a suggestion. You do not put him in the queue. You rearrange the queue around him. Huang watched this up close. Huang: “He does that by demonstrating.” Not by asking. Not by negotiating. Not by leveraging a contract clause. By moving so fast that everyone else’s normal pace feels like standing still. Three traits. Strip everything down. Show up at the failure. Move so fast the world rearranges around you. That is not a management philosophy. That is why one man runs six companies while entire boards cannot keep one moving.

September 1997. Steve Jobs stands before Apple employees and tells them he's been up until 3am finishing an ad. He's been back at the company for eight weeks. Apple lost $1 billion that year. Three months earlier, WIRED put Apple's logo on its cover, wrapped in barbed wire, with the word "Pray." He starts by saying what he's found since coming back. He couldn't figure out Apple's own product line. He spent weeks trying to understand which model was which and how they fit together. He talked to customers. They couldn't figure it out either. He cut 70% of the product roadmap. People whose projects were canceled were, in his words, "three feet off the ground with excitement" because, for the first time in years, someone told them where the company was going. Then he says something about marketing that changed how every tech company thinks about advertising. He says Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes. But when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company. Nike never talks about their products in ads. Never tells you why their air soles are better than Reebok's. "They honor great athletes. And they honor great athletics. That's who they are." He compares it to the dairy industry spending 20 years trying to convince people milk was good for them, failing, and then running "Got Milk," which doesn't even mention the product. Focuses on its absence. He says Apple spends a fortune on advertising. "You'd never know it." Then he fires the ad agency. Not just fires them. Apple was running a competition with 23 agencies. He scrapped the whole thing and hired Chiat/Day, the agency he'd worked with a decade earlier on the 1984 Macintosh commercial that advertising professionals voted the best ad ever made. The question they asked themselves: "Our customers want to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for?" His answer: "Apple at its core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. And that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do." Then he plays the ad. In this room. To Apple employees. For the first time. "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers." He says almost none of these people had ever appeared in an advertisement before. He personally obtained Yoko Ono's permission to use John Lennon. He says the estates and living subjects agreed because of their feelings toward Apple. "I don't think there is another company on Earth that could have done this campaign." The ad broke that Sunday during the network premiere of Toy Story on ABC. Two 60-second spots. Newspaper ads in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today. Billboards in major cities. Buses in five cities featuring Rosa Parks. Painted walls. The whole thing. Apple's stock was around $0.10 split-adjusted when this meeting happened. The company is worth $3.68 trillion today. Think Different ran for five years. Every product that came after, the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, was built on the identity this campaign established by a guy who'd been back at the company for eight weeks and finished the ad at three in the morning. Video: Steve Jobs internal staff meeting at Apple, September 1997. This is the first time the Think Different campaign has been shown to employees. Jobs had been back at Apple for eight weeks. Footage leaked from an internal recording.