Space Policy Edition: Mars via the Nuclear Option
Can nuclear propulsion fundamentally transform our ability to send humans to Mars? Bhavya Lal, a policy and nuclear engineering expert now working at NASA, helped write a new report on the topic for t...
6 Aug 20211h 10min
Alan Stern Says It’s Time for Suborbital Science
An experiment rode next to Richard Branson when he rocketed to the edge of space on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo last month. Planetary scientist Alan Stern says we’ve begun a new era of affordable s...
4 Aug 202146min
Andy Chaikin on Apollo 15 and the lessons of Apollo
Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan said of Andy Chaikin’s book A Man on the Moon, “I’ve been there. Chaikin took me back.” Andy returns to help us mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 15 and the first use...
28 Jul 20211h 27min
Amy Mainzer and a New Asteroid-Hunting Space Telescope
We may finally get the powerful telescope we’ve needed to find almost all of the near-Earth objects that are big enough to destroy a city. University of Arizona professor Amy Mainzer leads the NEO Sur...
21 Jul 202149min
We’re Going Back to Venus
Sue Smrekar and Jim Garvin woke up in June to some of the best news a planetary scientist can receive. Their complementary missions to Venus had just been given the green light by NASA. The VERITAS an...
14 Jul 20211h 2min
Visiting the James Webb Space Telescope
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is expected to be 100 times as powerful as its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. We talk with three leaders of the effort to build, launch and deploy it as soo...
7 Jul 20211h 18min
Space Policy Edition: The Pentagon's UFO Report, Featuring Sarah Scoles
The Pentagon finally released its hotly-anticipated briefing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. As expected, it provided little new information, saying only that there were a number of unexplainable ob...
2 Jul 20211h 18min
Finding Life by Looking for Complexity
University of Glasgow chemist Lee Cronin and his collaborators have developed a new way to detect life. Their "assembly theory" could give us a reliable method for recognizing life or evidence of past...
30 Jun 202156min
