Mat Kaplan’s first flight in zero-G

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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