Beyond I Stand With UCI
My writing. My work.
Explore my articles on space, industry, government, New York, history, and American life.
41 articles
American Life
The Boots That built Me
There are years of a man’s life that disappear so completely into repetition that memory ceases to preserve them as individual days and instead compresses them into an atmosphere, into weight, into…
6 min read · Read article →
UCI & Accountability
An Open Letter to Anthony Constantino
The Case for Accountability: The Adirondacks, a Howitzer, and the Case for Unconventional Concepts
8 min read · Read article →
UCI & Accountability
Beyond the Howitzer
Jaded Thunder, the Nuclear Silo, and the Other Story of Unconventional Concepts
15 min read · Read article →
American Life
Built Into My DNA
There are some things you inherit without ever realizing you inherited them. They are not written into a will or handed down in a box. Sometimes they sit quietly in old photographs and family stories for…
10 min read · Read article →
Industry & Energy
Green Power, State Power
New York's Renewable-Energy Siting System and the Battle Over Upstate Land
12 min read · Read article →
American Life
The Voice I Almost Lost
A conversation with an Oil man.
13 min read · Read article →
UCI & Accountability
The Case for Accountability Article I When the Process Becomes the Problem
The Case for Accountability Article I: When the Process Becomes the Problem
9 min read · Read article →
UCI & Accountability
The Case for Accountability Article III The Power to Outlast
The Adirondacks, a Howitzer, and the Case for Unconventional Concepts
10 min read · Read article →
UCI & Accountability
The Case for Accountability: When Government Cannot Define Yes
The Adirondacks, a Howitzer, and the Case for Unconventional Concepts
10 min read · Read article →
Space & Science
America Is Building a Space Academy
I have often wondered what an American academy built specifically for the space age would look like. I eventually went far enough to conceptualize my own. Now the United States government is beginning to ask…
16 min read · Read article →
Space & Science
Artemis II What America Actually Proved Around the Moon
Artemis II was not a rehearsal on paper. From April 1 through April 10, 2026, four astronauts took NASA’s new human deep-space transportation system beyond Earth orbit, around the Moon, farther from Earth than…
15 min read · Read article →
Space & Science
Artemis III Is Not What Most People Think It Is
For years, Artemis III had a remarkably simple meaning in the public imagination. Artemis I would prove that the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft could fly without a crew, Artemis II would put…
17 min read · Read article →
Government & Society
Article V Is Not a Loophole. It Is the Constitution
There is something fundamentally strange about hearing an Article V Convention of States described as though it were some clever loophole discovered by political activists looking for a way around the…
11 min read · Read article →
Space & Science
Blue Origin Just Ignited Its Own Hall-Effect Thruster, and That Blue Glow Matters
Blue Origin’s first internally developed Hall-effect thruster is more than another propulsion test. It is evidence that the company is building the machinery necessary to become an increasingly vertically…
15 min read · Read article →
Industry & Energy
Building The Modern American Nuclear Merchant Fleet
America does not need to rebuild the merchant marine of the twentieth century. It has an opportunity to build the merchant fleet of the twenty-first.
10 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
American Life
DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BECOME FORGED BEFORE DAWN
There have been stretches of my life when I have gotten up before four in the morning to go to work, worked through the day, handled everything else I had committed myself to, and made it home just before…
10 min read · Read article →
UCI & Accountability
Lindsay Clancy, Mental Illness, and Why Accountability Still Matters
The Lindsay Clancy case has become one of those rare criminal proceedings in which the public conversation surrounding the defendant threatens to overwhelm the conduct that brought the case into existence in…
10 min read · Read article →
Space & Science
Nancy Grace Roman The Telescope Built to Map the Invisible Universe
On August 30, 2026, another chapter in the history of American space astronomy began at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. At 7:26 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy lifted away…
17 min read · Read article →
Government & Society
New York Lets X Money In, Then Strips New Yorkers of the Yield
A 6 percent APY available to X Money customers elsewhere is being reduced to zero for New York residents, and Albany owes the people affected a much better explanation than regulatory silence.
9 min read · Read article →
Government & Society
Nine Means Nine Congress Moves to Put the Supreme Court’s Size Into the Constitution
Speaker Mike Johnson says the House will vote on a constitutional amendment fixing the Supreme Court at nine justices, turning a 157-year institutional norm into constitutional law and forcing Congress to…
15 min read · Read article →
Space & Science
SR-1 Freedom America Is Building a Nuclear Spaceship
For most of my life, the phrase “nuclear spaceship” has sounded like something belonging to the distant future, a technology discussed in engineering studies, science fiction, abandoned Cold War programs, or…
16 min read · Read article →
Industry & Energy
The $1.2 Billion Chobani Plant Rising in My Backyard
Rome, New York, is preparing for one of the largest food-manufacturing investments in American history, and the scale of what is coming to Griffiss is difficult to appreciate until the numbers are placed…
10 min read · Read article →
Industry & Energy
The Fab, the Fight and the Future Inside New York’s $100 Billion Micron Megafab
A semiconductor project decades in the making is now under construction outside Syracuse, but a consequential legal challenge could determine whether New York adequately balanced environmental law with one of…
18 min read · Read article →
Government & Society
When Albany Tells the Sheriff to Stand Down
Fifteen New York sheriffs are taking the state to federal court over its new restrictions on cooperation with ICE. Madison County Sheriff Todd Hood and Lewis County Sheriff Michael Carpinelli are among them,…
7 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
American Life
A 250-Year Celebration of American Independence
The Tea Party Was Not Over
6 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
Government & Society
Congratulations Anthony Constantino
Tonight is not the end of anything. It is the beginning of the next fight.
2 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
American Life
Dedication of Liberty Legacy Events in Memory of Charlie Kirk
There are moments in a man’s life when the road in front of him changes without warning.
5 min read · Read article →
American Life
FREEDOM 250 GRAND PRIX DC
The Freedom 250, travel exhaustion, and the strange realization that I have not actually traveled nearly as much as people think
10 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
American Life
I Went Back to Capitol Hill
What Changed Between My First and Second Visit to the Heart of the Republic
11 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
American Life
I went skydiving, and it changed my life!
There are some decisions that sound insane until the moment you make them. Then, once they are made and the moment is over, they become strangely simple. You sign the waiver. You put on the harness. You listen…
8 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
American Life
Lifting our Eyes, and why faith is a necessity
A Visit to Washington National Cathedral
7 min read · Read article →
Government & Society
New York Has Opened a Door It May Not Be Able to Close
New York Has Opened a Door It May Not Be Able to Close
8 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
Government & Society
New York Should Not Drive the Amish Out
Religious liberty does not mean much if it disappears the moment Albany decides compliance is more convenient
8 min read · Read article →
Government & Society
New York and the Civil War The Empire State That Helped Save the Union By James M Lacey
Stand among the monuments at Gettysburg and it becomes difficult to understand the Civil War as merely a conflict between two distant sections of the country. The names carved into the stone tell a different…
9 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
American Life
In the Shadows of Lincoln
I went to Washington, D.C. so you don’t have to.
5 min read · Read article →
Space & Science
SpaceX, the IPO, and the Future I Grew Up Watching
I have followed SpaceX since I was nine years old. I have watched every launch I could, not in person — not yet — but with the same awe every time that countdown hit zero and fire came out of the engines. For…
2 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
American Life
What it means to be American
To be American is, first, to belong to a place like no other in the history of the world.
3 min read · Read article →
Space & Science
Preserving the Great Orbital Cathedral of the Space Age
It Belongs in a Museum
12 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
Government & Society
Service to the People How New York Lost Control of Its Prison System By James Lacey
My father spent twenty-five years working in New York's correctional system. He served as a correction officer and later as a lieutenant and supervisor before retiring in 2006. Throughout my childhood, there…
18 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
Space & Science
The Rocket That came Home Falcon 9, Booster Reuse, and the Landing That Changed Spaceflight forever
There are moments in industrial history when a machine stops being merely a machine and becomes an argument. The steam locomotive argued that distance could be conquered. The assembly line argued that mass…
12 min read · Read article →
James Lacey
Government & Society
Why I Support Anthony Constantino
On Saturday, June 20, I finally had the opportunity to meet Anthony Constantino and personally endorse him for Congress. To some, that may seem like a simple campaign moment: a handshake, a photograph, a sign…
7 min read · Read article →
The image archive
