We’re gearing up for Season 8 and we have a special project in the works that you’ll hear sooner but today we’re looking back to one of our favorite Season Six episodes, a topic you may have heard about in the news more recently. It’s been nearly 50 years (!) since humans last walked on the Moon. But NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions will soon return astronauts to the lunar surface. Artemis isn’t just about going back – it’s about science! So to answer all of our burning questions about what Arte...
Jun 22, 2023•19 min
Season seven is over but don’t despair! We have some fun new things headed your way soon. In the meantime, we borrowed this episode from our friends at Smithsonian’s Sidedoor to tide you all over. It took pride, deceit, and a giant catapult to set off the feud between the Wright brothers and the Smithsonian. On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright made history when he flew over 800 feet across a blustery beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The airplane he flew that day is now a centerpiece of the ...
Jun 08, 2023•37 min
When Barbie first became an astronaut in 1965, she was more than a decade ahead of NASA sending a woman to space. Since then, there have been several versions of astronaut Barbie — from a spangly 80s doll to one who had a jumpsuit just like the one they give you at Space Camp. Today, astronaut Barbie actually went to the International Space Station! And she's joined by a collection of dolls that represent actual people who really contributed to space science like Sally Ride and Katherine Johnson...
May 25, 2023•28 min•Season 7Ep. 12
From Dante to Matt Damon, Percival Lowell to Perseverance, humans have long wondered about, studied, and eventually explored our closest planetary neighbor, Mars. In celebration of Matt's new book "For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet," we're taking you through how humans have shown Mars in stories, movies, and art through the centuries. Sign up here for the monthly AirSpace newsletter AirSpace is made possible by the generous support of Olay....
May 11, 2023•21 min•Season 7Ep. 11
In 1969, nearly 600 million people tuned in to watch the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Four of these rapt viewers were a family of Indian immigrants in Delaware. Four months later that family was driving through Ohio and decided to stop and knock on Neil Armstrong’s parent's door — because why not? This story, as told in the short film One Small Visit, has been making the rounds at film festivals and screenings around the world. Matt and Emily talk to the woman whose family knocked on that door and he...
Apr 27, 2023•19 min•Season 7Ep. 10
Imagine this: It’s 1936 and you’re taking a luxurious three day flight from Germany to the United States in the Hindenburg. But instead of landing in New Jersey as expected, you dock to the top of the tallest building in the world: the Empire State Building. This didn’t actual happen — turns out that’s a logistical and safety impossibility — but that didn’t stop the builders of the Empire State Building from using the potential of a mooring mast to advertise the building. After all, they had to ...
Apr 13, 2023•35 min•Season 7Ep. 9
Welcome to Animal Air! We invite all passengers to waddle, trot, sashay or mince aboard the aircraft as we prepare for takeoff. Make sure all tails and tail feathers are out of the aisle and remain inside the aircraft at all times. A duck in a hot air balloon. A cat in an airship. A lion cub in an airplane. Our animal companions have been up in human created aircraft even longer that we have. Since these stories do great on social media, we brought in our social media manager to help us tell fiv...
Mar 23, 2023•20 min•Season 7Ep. 8
Thanks to GPS, ecologists today can track thousands of animals all the time with tracking devices that can be smaller than a quarter. But in 1970 there was just a weather satellite, a 23 pound collar, and an elk named Monique. Between spooky elk herds, inconsistent darts, a rowdy press gaggle, angry letters, an upside-down collar, and a couple of upsetting deaths, Monique’s tracking didn’t exactly go off without a hitch. Back then scientists really didn’t know where animals went, and tracking th...
Mar 09, 2023•36 min•Season 7Ep. 7
The Juno spacecraft currently orbiting Jupiter almost didn’t have a camera, and boy would that have been a shame. Any time you launch something into space, weight is money. And when Juno was proposed and funded, a visible light camera wasn’t really needed to meet the mission’s science goals. But, thanks to the insistence of adamant Juno team members, Juno got JunoCam. And we’re so glad it did. On this episode of AirSpace, we unpack how JunoCam has contributed to science and completely changed th...
Feb 23, 2023•17 min•Season 7Ep. 6
In the fifties and sixties to get hired as a stewardess put you in a club that was akin to being a movie star. Around this time, a highly qualified woman, top of her training class, beautiful and poised, didn't understand why she wasn't being hired, until an instructor told her it was because she was Black. The lawsuit that followed opened the door to Black women being hired as stewardesses, but the result was less of a floodgate and more of a trickle. By the mid-1960s, most US airlines had hire...
Feb 09, 2023•25 min•Season 7Ep. 5
The pigeon – ubiquitous bird, oft city-dweller, and… war hero? You might even consider the humble pigeon to be the first military aviator. Before radio, homing pigeons were one of the most reliable forms of communications for sailors at sea and troops in trenches. The American use of these feathered aviators really took off during World War I when trench warfare made it dangerous for human runners to deliver messages from the front line. And these birds were not only integral to communications, ...
Jan 26, 2023•20 min•Season 7Ep. 4
We’ve all seen the breathtaking Hubble and JWST images of our universe, but have you ever wondered how these pictures are made? If you were to travel to the “Cosmic Cliffs” of the Carina Nebula or the “Pillars of Creation” of the Eagle Nebula, your eyes wouldn’t see the beautiful colors and patterns displayed in these popular images. But, that doesn’t make these pictures any less real. In today’s episode we explain how image processors take invisible (to us) light and data from space telescopes ...
Jan 12, 2023•36 min•Season 7Ep. 3
At the turn of the 20th century, astronomy got a serious glow-up. An influx of money and scientific advancements led to building bigger, better telescopes at newly-founded observatories across the country. Astronomers could see farther than ever before, and this led to a debate about exactly what they were seeing. Were these nebulous, fuzzy-looking discs in the sky part of the Milky Way? How big is our universe? On today’s episode, we’re telling the story of how the work of many astronomers cont...
Dec 22, 2022•35 min•Season 7Ep. 2
Welcome to Season 7 of AirSpace! We’re kicking off with an episode that really gets to the core of what AirSpace is all about – drilling down to unpack scientifically questionable movies we love... or at least love to hate. At its crust, this episode’s pick has all the makings of an epic disaster flick — an all-star cast (hello, Stanley Tucci), an epic Space Shuttle scene, and a fictional element called “unobtainium.” But trust us – despite a lot of questionable science, The Core isn’t the pits....
Dec 08, 2022•18 min•Season 7Ep. 1
Season 7 of AirSpace will be in your feeds starting December 8th! AirSpace is made possible by the generous support of Olay.
Dec 01, 2022•1 min
Just two more weeks until a brand new season of AirSpace! But today, we’re excited to bring you a special bonus drop from our friends at the National Portrait Gallery’s podcast PORTRAITS. George Takei went boldly where no man had gone before when he broke racial stereotypes to play Mr. Sulu on Star Trek. But he's also lent his celebrity to a stack of social causes. George traces his activism to a single, searing injustice-- his internment, along with thousands of other Japanese-Americans, during...
Nov 24, 2022•30 min
Season 7 of AirSpace is just around the corner, but today we have a special bonus drop from our friends at the Sidedoor podcast! You’ve likely seen recent awe-inspiring images from the James Webb Space Telescope, but this episode focuses on its predecessor: the Hubble Space Telescope. Sidedoor explores how America's first large space telescope went from a "billion-dollar blunder" to one of history's most important scientific instruments. Look for more episodes of Sidedoor wherever you get your p...
Nov 10, 2022•32 min
Picture this: it’s Halloween eve, 1938, and you’re gathered with your family around the radio to listen to the evening programs. All of a sudden, the broadcast is interrupted by a breaking news bulletin. First, a report of explosions on Mars, then news of a meteorite landing in New Jersey, and suddenly a correspondent is attacked live on air by a Martian heat ray! Obvious spoiler: there was no Martian attack that night. But there was a radio play — a performance of Orson Welles’ adaptation of “W...
Oct 27, 2022•18 min•Season 6Ep. 12
On October 4, 1957 the Soviet Union successfully launched the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik. This early Space Race milestone sparked a lot of reaction – it was unsettling for some, but for others it inspired an interest in rocketry and brought many scientists into the space industry. One of those people was Homer Hickam, a high schooler in a small West Virginia mining town who would go on to work for NASA, write a memoir, and inspire a movie. On today’s episode we unpack that film – ...
Oct 13, 2022•16 min•Season 6Ep. 11
You can’t fly really fast without a big boom. In 1964 continual sonic booms spelled a tremendous headache for the residents of Oklahoma City. For six months the US Air Force flew an airplane at supersonic speeds over the annoyed midwestern metropolis, often multiple times a day, in a series of tests called Project Bongo. The tests were part of the United States’ research into developing supersonic transport (civilian passenger aircraft that go faster than the speed of sound). Huge spoiler – thin...
Sep 22, 2022•29 min•Season 6Ep. 10
Sleeping in space goes back almost as far as there have been people in space (specifically, a cosmonaut who caught some shuteye in 1961). Astronauts have slept in capsules, shuttles, space stations, and even on the Moon. Sleep is an important part of an astronaut’s health, particularly for longer duration missions. But from noisy crewmates to spaceship sounds and even the sheer excitement of it all, sleeping in space hasn’t always been easy. To find out what it’s really like we speak with former...
Sep 08, 2022•26 min•Season 6Ep. 9
In 1971 an Apollo 14 astronaut took about 500 tree seeds into orbit around the Moon. When he got back, those seeds were distributed, germinated, and planted all around the United States. And then… they were mostly forgotten about, even by NASA. That is, until the mid-1990s when a teacher at a Girl Scout camp in Indiana wondered what was up with this “Moon Tree” at her local camp. On this episode, we speak with the NASA planetary scientist who received her question, and as a result, started a dat...
Aug 25, 2022•19 min•Season 6Ep. 8
Skywriting is something you might witness at the beach, or a sporting event, or an outdoor concert. A popular form of aerial advertising and even the occasional marriage proposal, skywritten messages can have a BIG impact (and with letters approximately 1500 feet tall… we mean that quite literally). But maybe you didn’t know that it originated with the military and dates wayyy back to the early days of aviation in 1910. This episode will be your exhaustive look into everything you’d want to know...
Aug 11, 2022•27 min•Season 6Ep. 7
Every day, satellites orbit Earth taking pictures. These images are used for everything from intelligence to weather prediction and even today’s topic – archeology. When you hear the term “space archeology” you might envision a khaki-clad astronaut excavating the Moon. But, space archeologists are actually Earth-bound researchers who use satellite and other aerial imagery to assist in archeological applications right here on our home planet. This imagery is used to find new archeological sites, ...
Jul 28, 2022•22 min•Season 6Ep. 6
It’s been nearly 50 years (!) since humans last walked on the Moon. But NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions will soon return astronauts to the lunar surface. Artemis isn’t just about going back – it’s about science! So to answer all of our burning questions about what Artemis astronauts will do, where they will go, and what makes this all different from Apollo, we spoke to the Artemis science lead, Dr. Sarah Noble. Did you know AirSpace has a monthly newsletter? Sign up here! AirSpace is made possi...
Jul 14, 2022•18 min•Season 6Ep. 5
A decade ago it was pretty rare to see an all-electric car on the road. Now that you see them all. the. time. we wondered – what about electric vehicles in the *sky*? Several companies are working to overcome the challenges of all-electric flight, and it’ll likely be a long time before your commercial plane goes electric. But smaller, shorter-distance applications of all-electric air transport might be just around the corner. In this episode, we speak to Dr. Martine Rothblatt to learn how her co...
Jun 23, 2022•17 min•Season 6Ep. 4
Happy Pride Month! Today, we’re bringing you a special installment of QueerSpace, our limited series featuring stories and people at the intersection of aviation, space, and LGBTQ+ history and culture. Seven years ago this month, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v Hodges that same-sex couples have the fundamental right to marry under the constitution. If you dig into an amicus brief for Obergefell, you’ll see mention of another case, Norton v Macy . This case set the first precedent ruling ...
Jun 09, 2022•13 min
In 1859 the Sun threw a temper tantrum directed at Earth. It spewed magnetized plasma into space, which made its way here and triggered effects that *literally* shocked telegraph operators (not to mention knocking down telegraph lines and causing aurora to be seen near the equator). If a geomagnetic storm of this size happened today, it could cause a widespread electrical and communications blackout. Events of that magnitude are rare but the Sun’s activity affects us all the time – from static o...
May 26, 2022•35 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Brr… it’s cold in here. There must be some thickness to this at-mo-sphere. On today’s episode, we’re cheering for the fraternal twins of the outer solar system. You might know them as the Ice Giants, but really they’re big mush-balls: Uranus and Neptune. And like most siblings, these two planets have plenty in common: both discovered by telescope, both have ring and moon systems, and both were studied by Voyager 2. Scientists have learned a ton about Uranus and Neptune over the last few decades,...
May 12, 2022•20 min•Season 6Ep. 2
On the scale of thrilling aviation activities, hot air balloon rides normally rank pretty low. But how would you feel if one balloon ride was your ticket to a better life? AND what if you had to not only pilot the balloon yourself, but build it from scratch, in secret? What started with a magazine article about the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta ended with a thrilling aerial escape from East Germany in 1979. On this episode of AirSpace, we hear what it was like from someone who lived it firsthand. A...
Apr 28, 2022•36 min•Season 6Ep. 1
