Kevin Zagorski

always easy to spot the engineers at the star trek event because they're the ones taking selfies with the warp core.

brushing up on space station acoustics design is much more enjoyable with a catalina express spicy bloody mary in hand.

Dude I can't remember the last time I watched an entire 2 hour YouTube video! Loved this.

The International Space Station lacks microbial diversity. Is it too clean? Hundreds of surface swabs reveal the station lacks microbial diversity, an imbalance that has been linked to health issues in other settings.

Super interesting paper cited here on the topic of space station cleanliness. It's not a matter of being "too dirty" or "too clean" - the variety and distribution of microbes on your station can have a huge impact on astronaut health.
www.sciencenews.org/article/inte...

harvest your dinner from oil rig support beams. you can just do things.

Plus the Catalina Express makes a mean post-dive bloody mary.

Woke up at 5am on a Saturday to hang out with sea lions. Back home in time for lunch. You'll have to pry California from my cold dead hands.

I get a real kick out of diving with my Orca Edge which was the first commercially available dive computer released in 1983. Still works great even though it looks like an aluminum brick! Always have a modern backup though...

I joined Vast Mission Assurance almost a month ago. It's so exciting (and a bit scary) to be building this thing!

@michaelsheetz.bsky.social was not expecting that twist! congrats!

Thanks for all the great reporting over the years and best of luck in what I assume is your pivot to focusing exclusively on surfing business new 🏄

After fixing a mailing address snafu I finally received my Antarctic Service medal. It's one of the few DoD medals that civilians are eligible for. Pretty neat.

Qualifying for the medal itself only requires 10 days of service on continent. The "Wintered Over" bar takes a little bit longer to get...

Overview: Station Arrivals Father Time has a funny way of sneaking up on us. It’s somehow been nearly four years since NASA announced the Commercial LEO Destinations (CLD) program, its plan to replace the International Space St...

"Crucially, Vast just set the bar for how to be taken seriously as a space station company, with transparency around when it aims to complete milestones leading up to the first crewed mission reaching Haven-1. Every other company working on a space station take note"

via @michaelsheetz.bsky.social

Realizing I haven't updated the blue place on my new gig: I started a few weeks ago in the Flight Safety & Mission Assurance group at Vast. We're vying to build the replacement to the International Space Station. It's really cool!

Building big space stations means building big doors.

File under: "Things you don't appreciate until you're doing it"

There was no winter machinist on station this past year so our utilities tech and I took on the fabrication (in addition to our normal jobs). I'm stoked with how it turned out and it's pretty neat that everyone visiting the South Pole over the next year will get to see it.

The 2025 marker includes miniature versions of the four main science labs at South Pole station: the Dark Sector Lab (South Pole Telescope and BICEP-3), the NOAA Atmospheric Research Observatory, MAPO (BICEP Array), and the IceCube Neutrino Detector.

Each year's pole marker is different and the winter crew can choose what sort of message they want to send with the design. With so many infrastructure challenges threatening the US Antarctic program these days we wanted to re-focus on the reason we were there in the first place: Science.

Every Jan 1st at the South Pole the summer season crew unveils the new geographic pole marker which is designed and fabricated on-site by the previous winterover team. I had the privilege of machining the 2025 marker with my buddy Luke and I can finally show it off.

Beelining for Japan after a year in Antarctica was the pro-est move

13 months in Antarctica.
Finally saw a penguin (in NZ).

Last footsteps in Antarctica after 13 long months.

In my hotel in Christchurch. Can't escape 😂

Attempts to leave South Pole are becoming more desperate by the day.

Moving to places where the default orientation of globes is *not* Antarctica-up is going to take some getting used to...

365 days at South Pole station, about a week left to go. We spent the day training the new winterover crew and posing for Radio Telescope Men Quarterly.

Be not afraid, the 600 foot-pound torque wrench is your friend.

One last photo with the whole 2024 South Pole science team before two of our crew flew out last week.

Sneak preview of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station winterover crew photo alongside our first aircraft arrival of the season.

Continuing my attempts to wean off the other place. Up to this point I've found Bsky to be a bit more dead than mastodon though. Maybe the recent infusion will help?