CSo America has officially ruined Icelandic yogurt.
MThat's a strong opener. What did we do to skyr?
CLevels, the guy who runs that AI app empire, posted a picture of the ingredients in American skyr asking, and I quote, "what in the fuck do they put in this?"
MI saw this. The answer is sugar. The American version has real added sugar—nineteen grams in the vanilla, twenty-two in the blueberry.
CSo you're getting a dessert with a health halo. That's the whole problem.
MHere's the twist though: the Icelandic version isn't clean either. It's labeled sugar-free because it's full of sucralose and acesulfame-K.
CWait, so in Iceland they sweeten it with chemicals, and here they use real sugar? That's backwards.
MIt's a business decision. Whole Foods has a banned ingredients list—no sucralose, no acesulfame-K. The brand had to reformulate for the U.S. market, and real sugar was the easy fix.
CSo it's not a conspiracy to make Americans fat. It's a corporate compliance workaround.
MExactly. There was even a whole investigation in Reykjavik. They called it... the "conskyracy."
CA con-skyr-acy. That's terrible.
MThe funnier part is Levels got roasted in the replies. This guy posted he bought skyr because of Levels' protein propaganda, and it's actually worse than Chobani Greek yogurt.
CChobani whole milk—same protein, no added sugar, no bean gum, and cheaper in bulk. The reply basically did a full nutritional teardown.
MAnd that's the thing about the health influencer pipeline. One guy with a million followers says eat skyr, and suddenly everyone's paying a premium for Icelandic branding with American sugar.
CTo be fair, plain skyr is genuinely good. The problem is nobody buys plain.
MThe Atlantic pointed out flavored Greek yogurts often have as much sugar as a fudge bar. Plain yogurt is four grams. Skyr, Greek, whatever—the flavoring is the trap.
CSo the moral is: read the label, not the influencer.
MOr just buy plain and throw frozen berries in it. Anyway, speaking of launches and landings.
CSpace traffic is getting real. There's a post floating around about NASA redesigning the Artemis moon landings because Orion's propulsion just isn't enough.
MThis is one of those truncated headlines from TechSignal—no full article, no official confirmation. But the core idea is worth talking about: Orion can't get itself into a useful lunar orbit on its own.
CWhich is absurd, because that's the entire point of the spacecraft. We built the capsule, spent a fortune, and now we need SpaceX and Blue Origin to babysit it.
MHold on. Orion was designed for a different mission profile. The current architecture was patched together across three administrations.
CWhich is exactly my point! We keep redesigning Artemis every time Congress sneezes, and now the hardware doesn't fit the plan.
MOkay, but the fix isn't crazy. Let Starship and New Glenn do the heavy lifting, use Orion for what it's decent at—crew transfer in lunar space.
CThat's not a moon program, that's a rideshare scheme with extra steps.
MIt's a moon program that actually launches this decade, which is more than the old plan could say.
CFair point. But if Blue Origin's return to flight slips again, we're back to square one.
MAnd that's the thread in every 321 Launch newsletter—New Glenn's cadence, Starship's next mission, the jellyfish launch everyone saw last week. The infrastructure is the story now.
CBlue Origin says they have a plan to dramatically increase New Glenn's launch rate. I want to believe it. The company's been slow for years.
MThey finally have a rocket that works. Now they need to launch it more than once a quarter.
CIf they hit even six launches next year, that changes the industry math.
MRight, the numbers only matter if the cadence holds.
CNASA's betting on both horses, so maybe rivalry gets us to the moon faster than monopoly.