The name came before the paperwork.
insistent Galactic Operationz.
Insistent means continuing despite difficulties, opposition, and discouragement. I picked it before there was anything to be insistent about, which turned out to be the right order. Galactic is the ambition, stated without apology. Operations is a reminder that the point is to operate rather than to theorize. I filed it with an s in 2019 and changed the spelling to Operationz in 2022, because I wanted to. The state considers them the same name. The z is ours.
On September 25, 2019, I filed it with the state. That date was my father’s birthday, which I did not plan and have never forgotten.
I reserved the name with the Oklahoma Secretary of State before the company existed. The reservation shows on the state’s records above the LLC, expired, which is the order it happened in.
I paid the extra twenty five dollars for same day service so that it would be filed on the 25th and not whenever the office got to it.
Steve McConnell
Before any of the filing, I went back to my high school art teacher.
Steve taught at Bishop McGuinness from 1975 until 2023, forty eight years. He worked in pottery, ink line drawings, watercolors and lithography, and he painted the icons that hang in the school. He was the first person I asked for help with the logo, in August 2019, a month before the company legally existed.
Steve died on March 17, 2025, at the cabin he built in Tahlequah. He taught thousands of students over those forty eight years and I was one of a great many who went back to him as an adult and found him willing. This entry exists partly so that his hand in this is on the record.
Monte Moore
The logo was finished by Monte Moore.
Monte took a BFA in graphic design and illustration from Colorado State in 1993 and studied under Frank Covino for twenty years. He works in acrylics, pencils, oils and airbrush, has twice won the World Fantasy Art Show, and has drawn commercial work for Lucasfilm, DC Comics and Marvel. He grew up on a working cattle ranch in Idaho.
What follows is the sequence, roughly as it happened.
The astronaut is a child on purpose. The people who will actually live and work among the asteroids are not born yet.
The i is one human being, standing for all of them. The palm branch is held behind the back. The patch on the shoulder is Earth, which is where this started and what it is for.
A name and a logo are not a company. But they are the first things that exist outside your own head, and they make the thing harder to quietly abandon. Two artists put their hands on this before anyone had reason to believe in it, and that is worth writing down.