This week went by fast, between my spending the first two days of it in Austin for SXSW and then spending all of Wednesday at the Satellite 2023 conference in downtown D.C. And then St. Patrick’s Day came around–which this year reminded me of how great it was to return to Ireland last summer, the first trip I made there with my Irish passport.

3/15/2023: The CIA’s SXSW Sales Pitch: We Need Your Help, Please Come Work for Us, PCMag

Four Central Intelligence Agency executives gave a talk at SXSW Monday afternoon with an interesting wrinkle: If you resent ubiquitous digital surveillance and want to find ways to defeat it, our agents and assets in hostile countries could use your help.

3/15/2023: Amazon’s Project Kuiper Satellite Receivers Cost Less Than $400 to Make, PCMag

If Satellite 2023 had not been scheduled on top of SXSW, I could have watched Amazon’s Tuesday-morning keynote in person and filed this post Tuesday afternoon. Instead, I wrote up the company’s news about its upcoming Project Kuiper constellation of low-Earth-orbit broadband satellites after reading Amazon’s blog post and reading press accounts of the talk.

3/17/2023: Here’s how NASA plans to replace the International Space Station—by becoming a private company’s tenant, Fast Company

This story started out with my watching a few panels about NASA’s plans for “commercial LEO destinations” at the Commercial Space Transportation Conference in early February, spending the next two weeks lining up interviews with most of the companies bidding for this work, having MWC force me to set aside the work for a week, finally filing the story the night before I headed out for SXSW, and then having my editor not look at the piece until after SXSW because he was also busy at the festival.