Podcaster: Mike Simmons; Guest: Ron Rosano
Title: Big Impact Astrononomy: Ron Rosano
Organization: Astronomy for Equity
Link : https://astro4equity.org/big-impact-astronomy-podcast/
Description:
Ron Rosano, a commercial astronaut, conducts Space Chats with students worldwide, answering their questions about spaceflight. He finds that while kids are generally curious, teachers in the U.S. face more pressure to cover curriculum due to testing demands. Despite time zone challenges, Rosano enjoys sharing his spaceflight experiences, even with young children who have vivid imaginations about space. He shares his passion for astronomy and space exploration. He emphasizes the importance of outreach and education, particularly for underserved communities, to inspire a sense of wonder and connection to the cosmos. Rosano hopes to continue inspiring students and promoting a global perspective on our shared planet.
Big Impact Astronomy: Through the Telescope is a video podcast that highlights the remarkable work of astronomy enthusiasts worldwide. Hosted by Mike Simmons, this podcast showcases how astronomy is used to improve lives in schools, refugee camps, hospitals, and more. Each episode features dedicated volunteers who introduce STEM in developing countries, inspire girls to pursue science careers, and bring hope to communities in crisis. Join us as we explore the stories of these unsung heroes making a difference through the wonders of the cosmos.
Bio: Mike Simmons is the founder of Astronomy for Equity ( https://bmsis.org/astro4equity/ ). Others on the team, including people around the world in astronomy and space exploration, authors and philosophers, designers and artists and more will be added as the website is developed.
Mike founded Astronomers Without Borders in 2006 to unite astronomy and space enthusiasts around the world through their common interests. During the UN-declared International Year of Astronomy 2009, Mike led the effort to organize the Cornerstone Project 100 Hours of Astronomy in more than 100 countries, with an estimated one million people looking through outreach telescopes in one night.
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Transcript:
[Mike Simmons]
Welcome to Big Impact Astronomy, where we explore stories of how the stars are changing lives and connecting communities around the world. From stargazing under war-torn skies, to bringing science education to isolated communities, we uncover the incredible impact of astronomy beyond the observatory. This episode of Big Impact Astronomy is brought to you by Primalucha Labs.
Primalucha Labs makes space exploration accessible for all and empowers communities worldwide through innovative educational astronomy solutions. Hello everyone, I’m Mike Simmons, the founder of Astronomy for Equity, and welcome to the podcast. Today I have a good friend as a special guest here, Ron Rosano.
I’ve known Ron in doing astronomy outreach, which he has done since 1995, but last year in October, he flew into space in a suborbital flight with Virgin Galactic, and now that’s given a big boost to the things he’s doing. He does a lot of remote outreach. He’s talked to school rooms in 20 countries, a total of 18,000 students so far, with about a quarter of them outside the U.S. Ron has been a space fan like me since the early days. I think I remember Sputnik. I think he doesn’t go back that far. Ron’s also the creator and editor of the Suborbital Flight Journal, which is a record of all human suborbital flights, including his and going all the way back to the Mercury program.
He’s a NASA Solar System ambassador, giving presentations at 70 different events. He’s also on the advisory council of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Board of Advisors of the Human Space Program, and the Board of Directors of the Nepal Youth Foundation. So welcome, Ron, to the podcast.
As you’re known by the little ones when you go to the schools and stuff. You know, before we even get into talking, I got to start with kind of this. This is the moment.
Here you are, last October, looking back to Earth from space. It’s just a fabulous picture that you’ve got here. And, you know, I’m starting off with this because everyone’s going to ask you what it’s like.
And Yoel, tell us how you answer that question.
[Ron Rosano]
Thanks. This is kind of my go-to image. It’s from a camera mounted at the window, a video camera, actually.
So it’s a screen capture at the window of the spaceship. And, you know, it’s very, there’s so many aspects of the experience. It’s hard to put it into, you know, a short number of words.
But yeah, this is our planet. And we, you know, we don’t, in all of our day-to-day concerns of what we’re doing and what’s important to us, we don’t really have a sense of being on a spaceship together. And, you know, my, you know, one of my big takeaways is that until you go off the planet and look back on it, you really don’t have a sense of it.
And this was my sense of it. It’s a little color enhanced and sharpened. But one thing I always like to point out is that blue line there at the edge of the planet, the margin between the ground and the vacuum of space, that black, empty vastness.
And it was just shocking to me, astonishing, the thinness of that blue line. That’s all of our atmosphere. Everything alive on earth exists within that blue line.
And even though, you know, I’d read astronaut accounts and talked to astronauts and they, many, many had said, oh, you’re not going to believe how thin the atmosphere is. And I’m like, okay, yeah, okay. That’s like, I get that.
But then like, then you see it and it’s like, oh my, it’s like still, still really, really stunning. And, you know, that’s just part of it. But yeah.
[Mike Simmons]
Yeah. So I’ve heard that from other astronauts. Like you say, everybody is shocked by that.
There are a number of things that you really can’t prepare for just pretty much like any completely new experience, but especially with something so extreme that they come back with a greater sense of the fragility of the earth with that tiny little atmosphere there. That’s everything.
[Ron Rosano]
Yes. It’s a narrow shell. It’s, you know, more or less 40 miles on 8,000 miles diameter of the planet.
If you have a globe around and you lay a paper clip on the edge of the globe, that’s kind of how it works out to scale.
[Mike Simmons]
You have a picture behind you of the earth. And I don’t see, I’m going to make you bigger. I can take a more of a look at it.
I’ve got to put you here. I don’t see atmosphere there. I mean.
[Ron Rosano]
No, it’s all there. This is, I was looking for, you know, an image I could use on a wall. And I chose this one through Apollo 11, they’re outbound in California and the West coast of the US is in there.
So this is July, 1969. I was nine years old at this time. And I’m in that picture somewhere in the little tiny little margin there, you know, in California, you know, looking up, but that’s, that’s our ride.
[Mike Simmons]
Yeah. It’s just, I don’t think anybody thinks about it. You just, it’s, can’t even see it.
It’s pretty amazing. So let’s go ahead and talk about the, the ride itself. Here you are looking at a different window.
It looks like you’re looking away from earth. Is that right?
[Ron Rosano]
I’m looking actually down on earth at this point. So there’s earth reflected, well, earth seen through the windows there. So this is, you know, during our three minutes of weightlessness as the Virgin galactic spaceship goes up and comes down, it’s very, the flight path is very much like throwing a ball in the air.
The rocket engine fires, it’s finishes pointing straight up. It’s going 2,200 miles an hour. And then 90 seconds later, it’s going zero at apogee because how gravity works and it grabs this 10,000 pound spaceship.
And you’d be going fast like that, but still gravity brings you back pretty quickly. So what they do, the spaceship has, we had, it flew with four seats there. It has room for six.
And there’s my crewmate Trevor at the very bottom of the frame in the area behind the four seats that was kind of reserved for the other two seats that didn’t get placed there. So he stretched across, you know, looking out the side window, there’s windows at the side of each seat windows at the top. So I took a minute to look at the top window at this, what they do because windows are on the top as the spaceship is after it finishes their motor burn and like is coasting up to the high point, the apogee, it turns over.
And so it’s upside down. So those windows that are on the ceiling are actually looking straight down at the earth.
[Mike Simmons]
Another one of you, tell us what we’re seeing out the window.
[Ron Rosano]
Earlier in the flight, this is right after they released the spaceship from the carrier plane. The spaceship is carried up to about 45,000 feet. Then like the X-15 air launched rocket powered glider, they released the spaceship, fires the rocket motor, it goes up.
So this is during the boost, the rocket motor is firing. You can see the reflection of the flame in the tail booms there in the mirror. And it’s just starting to turn towards pointed straight up over New Mexico.
It’s the Rio Grande river and elephant Butte reservoir north of Las Cruces. They’re below us and the atmosphere is just starting to come into view. And, you know, we’re strapped into our seats.
And it’s funny at this point, I’m thinking, Clark, I’m not sure why we really need seatbelts because we’re feeling three times the force of gravity pushing us back in our seat. We’re definitely not going anywhere, whether we’re strapped in or not.
[Mike Simmons]
And then post-flight, because you’re all…
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah, this is a favorite picture. This is, you know, my crewmates Trevor and Namira. After we’ve landed, that’s our commander Kelly Latimer there in the middle with the pilot CJ Sturckow on the left hand side.
He’s the human being that’s flown into space more than any other as of now, four times on NASA space shuttles and six times with Galactic. Between Trevor and I there in the back is Beth Moses, the Virgin Galactic astronaut trainer. This was her sixth flight.
It was great to have her there with us. Here’s your ride. That is our ride.
That’s, yes, Spaceship Unity, all carbon fiber, custom built. It’s all reusable except for the cartridge of the rocket engine. And behind the cabin, there’s a nitrous oxide tank that carries the nitrous oxide gas that’s combined with the solid rubber fuel that’s in the cartridge of the rocket engine.
And when it’s time to go, they open a valve, ignite the gas, and the gas flows out through the engine and sends us up to space.
[Mike Simmons]
Thanks to you, I got to meet the people at Virgin Galactic in April as the eclipse guy at the Virgin Galactic retreat. And it was a bunch of great people. I just had a great time.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah, it’s been a great experience. They’re well-focused on, you know, having it, you know, be meaningful in many ways and more than just, you know, a highlight experience of a lifetime, but, you know, finding meaning beyond that.
[Mike Simmons]
Now let’s go to back down on Earth. Here you are at the Space Station Museum, and you’re doing some outreach there of some sort. What is this?
[Ron Rosano]
That’s a great little local museum here in Northern California in Nevada. And they held an annual event. The owner there is a great collector of space artifacts.
And he has like a lunar module, scale lunar module, you know, on-premises and, you know, a lot of some flown hardware and some replica hardware. So I visited them several years in a row to talk about Galactic Unite, which is our outreach group of future astronauts that are connected with Virgin Galactic. And, you know, let kids know, let people know that, you know, we’re on, we’re just at the beginning of the era of commercial spaceflight.
You know, for the first time ever, people from all over the world can buy tickets to fly to space. And that’s something that most people, you know, don’t really realize. And this is not only that, but an opportunity for students to know that, hey, you know, they’ll be able to go to space someday, very likely, you know, and they, if they’re interested, can be involved in spaceships and working for space companies in any number of ways.
You know, yes, engineers and pilots, but, you know, graphic designers, people that like design the patch or mission patch that we had for our flight and, you know, photographers and videographers and, you know, people that, you know, when we have a space hotel, we’re gonna need, you know, people up there taking care of the visitors that come to the hotel. And, you know, there’s people that work that have expertise in, you know, building spaceships that just do hands on kinds of jobs that is more of a trade related skill rather than, you know, a four year graduate degree. There’s people that run the networks that are like experts in computer data.
So maybe kids now that are into gaming and figuring out how to connect their computers with their friends’ computers could translate that to, you know, managing the data for spaceships or satellites or something. So.
[Mike Simmons]
It’s something that people don’t realize is that space is not a job description. It’s a place. And if you have certain skills, you can be a part of the space industry just as much as any other industry.
It’s not really any different. You know, you can work on the ground or if you’re fortunate enough in space. It’s like Captain Kirk said in Star Trek four, you know, and when he was asked, so you’re from space, right?
And he said, oh, I’m from Iowa. I just work in space. That’s great.
Yeah. And, you know, I was really fortunate to be invited along with you and another Virgin Galactic astronaut just a couple of days ago to visit SpaceX. And I that really loved every minute of that.
But, you know, it’s something we both came away with in the factory there. It’s a factory. They’re not building cars.
They’re not building airplanes. A lot of guys there used to be in aerospace and they’re building aircraft and they just happen to be building rockets and stuff. But otherwise, you know, there’s just nothing special for most of them.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah. It’s not, it’s not like there’s not huge barriers. If you’re inclined and have those kinds of skills, like seeing, I don’t know, however many it was, six, eight test stands where they’re building engines that are flying rockets to space and they finish an engine in like three days and then like they build another one and they’re just cranking them out and launching rockets.
And yeah, it was interesting to find out, you know, what kinds of skills those people bring to the job. And, you know, they had said that a lot of it’s people that are into high-performance cars, which I hadn’t thought about. You know, they’re connecting tiny parts under high pressures within very specific, exact ways.
And, you know, people that are very interested in building things that are very technical like that. So it’s not, doesn’t seem like the kind of things you learn in college so much, but you just have an aptitude for.
[Mike Simmons]
There are a lot of engineers, of course, and a lot of people with advanced degrees, you have to have that. But most of the people behind the scenes are just regular people that happen to work there. For those who didn’t get a good look at your mission patch, I’m going to share here.
The reason I wanted to show this is because you gave me this face. Oh, the face, yeah.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah, Galactica was kind enough to fly a bunch of those and a bunch of stickers, which I really wanted to have. And it’s nice to be able to give them out to students and friends and like have a personal connection to them.
[Mike Simmons]
Yeah, no, it’s awesome. So let’s talk about kids. And that’s what we both do.
And in fact, I’m offering this sticker, I think, to actually, I asked my 12 year old granddaughter if she wanted to take these to school to show the kids what she’s studying astronomy and science now. And she ended up deciding not to because she is afraid the boys would take them away, you know. So I’m going to give her the sticker.
She can stick it on somebody. Nobody’s going to take that away. Inspiring the next generation and generations beyond is what we do.
Now this, this looks like a special tour or something. We’re not in a class.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah, that was a special day. That was at Spaceport New Mexico, watching Richard Branson’s flight into space on Unity 22 in July 2021. So these are all students from New Mexico school that Virgin Galactic brought out to watch the launch and let them, you know, see that all happening with their own eyes.
And, you know, provide inspiration for those kids and like, yeah, let them know that people are launching their space right in their own backyard. It’s great to bring them out there and let them see that live in person.
[Mike Simmons]
Largely Hispanic, of course, in Las Cruces.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah.
[Mike Simmons]
And not all privileged kids.
[Ron Rosano]
No, not at all.
[Mike Simmons]
It’s a great opportunity for that. You know, speaking of Richard Branson’s flight, you can tell he really cares about what it is he’s doing. He’s not trying to make another few billion dollars here.
Because on his flight, he sat in his seat and gave a little speech. And I kept thinking, Richard, get out of your seat and look at through the window out the window or something, you know, he wanted to make sure he made a statement about it.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah, he had, it’s funny, a friend of mine, Maya, worked very close with him and was kind of one of his escorts, getting ready for the flight, and she said that he went over what to say there many, many times, and you know, had a certain kind of message, and it was like, yeah, you know, I’m an adult here in a spaceship, and we’re going to space doing amazing things. All you students out there, what do you, what could you do that, you know, that could, you know, maybe be like that. So yeah, yeah, those opportunities are there.
[Mike Simmons]
Increasing all the time at a rate that I never thought was possible. It’s amazing. So you’ve been doing outreach and education in schools for a really long time.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah.
[Mike Simmons]
And I really like the international aspect of it, because that’s what I’ve been doing for just about the same length of time before doing local outreach. And so here is one you’re doing remotely with a school. Where are we here?
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah, this is St. Andrew’s School in Bangkok. Through Virgin Galactic, we, in partnership with them, I started organizing what came to be known as Space Chats, where we do a video call with students anywhere in the world, and just really do Q&A to, you know, let the students know that this is, you know, the start of a new era of commercial spaceflight, and that, you know, it’s, there’s a lot of opportunities that they probably didn’t think about.
So that’s been a really rewarding experience, and I love doing it. So we, it’s been about 12 years now, I think, of Space Chats, up to total of 350 or more. Those are some of the schools, and, you know, they find us in different ways, you know.
But yeah, I’ve chatted with the students there at St. Andrew’s, I think, three years in a row now. And it’s a particular approach. It’s not a stand and deliver thing where I’m, like, talking for 20 minutes.
It’s not a presentation. We send the teachers a video. This was important, especially early on, so that students could see, oh, these are not NASA astronauts.
They’re not going to orbit like the astronauts, you know, they’re most familiar with. It’s commercial astronauts, and we ask the teachers to have the students prepare questions. So we’ll do a quick introduction, and with a classroom or two or three, do Q&A through, you know, the entire session, and answer every question from every student, and give every student the opportunity to have one-on-one with me or other people that actually, at the beginning, were going to fly to space and now have flown to space, and with people from Virgin Galactic, you know, building spaceships.
[Mike Simmons]
So I don’t know if you know it or not, but Thailand is very active in astronomy. They have a national observatory, a very active government-funded program, so they’re really kind of a leader in that whole region. What do you find talking to so many students, both in the U.S. and in other countries? My impression from the things that I’ve always done is kids are kids, but what about in terms of preparation type of questions you get or anything else? Do you see any differences with what you do?
[Ron Rosano]
Yes, for sure. I’ve done a number of schools in Canada and the U.K., and the feeling I get is that the teachers have more freedom, less pressure to kind of fit the session in with certain restraints. In the U.S., there seems like there’s a lot of demands for testing, and it’s not as easy to fit us into curriculum, and of course, I recognize that anytime a teacher wants to have a chat with us for an hour, they’re probably displacing something out of their curriculum that had merit to be there in the first place. So for sure, it’s not easy for teachers to carve, for many teachers to carve out, you know, an hour like that, but it seems to be more restrained in the U.S. than, you know, elsewhere in the world.
[Mike Simmons]
I can confirm that, too. My wife’s a retired teacher, and they’ve known a lot of teachers, and there is a lot of pressure there to cover things, and you know, how to do educational things in astronomy, programs that involve other countries around the world, they love it because they’re getting something they wouldn’t otherwise get, and they say, yeah, bring it on. And in the U.S., it can be tough because there’s a lot they have to cover.
[Ron Rosano]
One thing that’s tricky about talking to Bangkok or Asia like that is you really have to be conscious of the time. So I was talking to them at Monday, nine o’clock their time, which was Sunday night, like seven or eight o’clock my time, so it’s very easy to get the dates crossed up, and then it’s funny talking to them, it’s like, oh, wow, it’s Monday morning for you, it’s Sunday night, I haven’t gone to bed yet, and they’re like, what? It’s like, whoa, wait a minute.
[Mike Simmons]
I’m familiar with that, but my meetings, because they talk to people everywhere, but my meetings are with adults, not with the kids, and but it still has an impact because I showed up for a meeting with Tokyo one time, and there’s nobody there, and I wrote to them, said, yeah, where is everybody? And they said, the meeting was yesterday, because I had, it was on a certain day their time, which meant it was the day before, so I missed it.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah, same day, it’s confusing.
[Mike Simmons]
Here we have another, this is an interesting mix here.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah, this was a, there’s a Virgin Galactic Future Astronaut that I think had a student at this school in Dakar, Senegal, the international school, and they said, hey, you know, one of my students at the school, would you like to talk to them? It’s like, absolutely, that’s like a wonderful thing. So even, yeah, there’s a great enthusiasm, even like people, students get, kids get the idea of being an astronaut and going to space, and it’s a special thing, and that’s, you know, kind of, for me, makes me want to be more involved.
It’s like, I almost feel like an obligation, you know, I’ve had this great privilege of being able to see the planet, but, you know, now I have to report back. And, you know, it’s funny, students, even at the youngest age, ages, you know, age four, five, six, before even kindergarten, have an idea of an astronaut, and that it’s special, and it’s something about it is very much built into the culture, that kids get that being an astronaut is a special thing. So that’s really special for me to be able to go in, in that role and say, hey, you know, it’s like, here’s some cool things that happened there.
[Mike Simmons]
You told me a story about talking to some really young ones, four-year-olds, I think, and that’s, wow, that’s tough.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah, it’s funny, there’s a local nursery school teacher that said, hey, would you come to my class? And it’s like, well, how old are the students? And it’s like, they’re four.
They’re pre-K. So I’m like, wow, how do I like, how do I explain space to kids that are just kind of figuring out the neighborhood, you know? So I was wearing my flight suit that I had on the flight, and I’m thinking, okay, so it’s like, they can see clouds, and they can have an idea of like, when you go past the clouds, this is what happens.
And, you know, the kids were just breathless with questions. They were like, astronaut Ron, when did you go? Who’d you go with?
How long did you go? What’d you eat? Like, when were you there?
And it was, I just, I couldn’t, I couldn’t answer the questions fast enough. And then I was listening to their questions, and they’re like, they thought that I came to their school in my spaceship, and then it was parked around the corner. And then when I leave, I was going to get back in the spaceship and go back to space.
Of course, it’s like, like a fireman comes from the fire station, and like, the teacher, you know, lives at school. It’s like, it’s very strange to see your teacher, like, in a grocery store or something, when you’re a third grader. It’s like, wait a minute.
And then one of the kids came to me afterwards, and they made a really nice thank you sign that says, you know, thank you, astronaut Ron, all center aligned. And one of the kids came up to see this light, and he was like, astronaut Ron, did you know that astronaut has Ron in it? I’m like, ah, it’s like, brilliant.
I never thought of it that way. And then, so like, at the end, I was there for half an hour. But the students that I thought might have the hardest time really connecting to a spaceflight experience came at it in the most, like, enlightened and fun way.
[Mike Simmons]
They don’t have any restrictions, either. I mean, they’re, you know, we’re born scientists, and they’re still in that phase. And everything goes as far as that goes.
That’s great. You know, from dealing with kids and grandkids, and actually, the girl, 12-year-old girl I mentioned, she’s a great grandchild. So I’m used to it.
But they’re delightful. And I want to say that one thing from this picture is that you can get this kind of enthusiasm and this kind of picture anywhere in the world from the kids. And I’ve got them from other places.
Yeah, yeah. It’s very much universal.
[Ron Rosano]
Why wouldn’t you do that? It’s so much fun. It’s like, yeah, and have that kind of experience.
[Mike Simmons]
Absolutely. Now, here’s another one. Chile, another country?
[Ron Rosano]
Yes, in Cambodia. I have no idea how this teacher found me, but she did. This is Peppercorn School in Cambodia.
And, you know, it helps a lot with this, the approach of sending them the video, and having the teachers, you know, take time to explain, okay, this is what happened. They’re sending people to space. And the kids just come at it with all kinds of questions.
It’s easy for them to connect with what’s going on. And I think it’s always exciting to have like somebody new pop into the classroom, whether it’s in person or in video. It’s like, wow, here’s somebody from anywhere in the world, which is like a fabulous thing.
[Mike Simmons]
And here, we’re back to the US, but this one is really special.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah, this is a really, really remote school in Venity, Alaska. No roads, you can only fly in there. I think this is the entire school in the small town.
It’s 150 people, 120 people or something. And it’s like, no running water, not a lot of infrastructure there. And, you know, to be able to go to them and say, hey, you know, this is a kind of a unique thing that’s happening in another part of the world, really helps them or help them connect to, you know, all the day things they see closed in life there.
[Mike Simmons]
Yeah, it looks like a fair number of indigenous.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah, those are the students that need it most. I think it’s like, wow.
[Mike Simmons]
Well, you know, the things I’m doing, and you’re actually, I should mention, on our board of advisors to astronomy for equity. And those are the ones we focus on. This is why I love the stuff that you do too, Ron, because the programs we’re doing now are the things I’ve learned dealing with people around the world.
And I call them the unserved, not even underserved. I mean, they’ve got nothing in this US, but you know, you’re remote enough in Alaska that you’re really, really marginalized. And you don’t have science facilities and everything else.
But we do have the sky above, we have astronomy everywhere. And that’s what we take advantage of. So how has this all changed for you since we first met quite a long time ago, you were doing astronomy, I didn’t even know at first.
And I don’t know if you might have been before Virgin Galactic, that you were signing up and on the wait list. But now you’re an astronaut, does it change? Do you still do astronomy?
Or is it just all about the space flight and space industry?
[Ron Rosano]
A lot of it’s focused on space flight now. But yeah, I still love to get out and do astronomy. I’m going to visit the local middle school next month, actually the end of this month, they’re having astronomers from Robert Ferguson Observatory in Sonoma bring telescopes.
So yeah, I started in like the mid 90s, with John Dobson and building a telescope. With him, you know, he, he came to be known as the kind of creator inventor of this what’s now known as the Dobsonian telescope. And he was a great advocate for sharing the night sky with people.
And he taught a nine week class year after year in San Francisco at the Academy of Sciences. And like super easy to sign up and make a telescope with Dobson. And yeah, he was all about, you know, getting telescopes on the sidewalks, sidewalk astronomers and sharing, you know, views of the sky with people.
It’s like, hey, be aware of all this, all these other things that are happening beyond the surface. So yeah, he was a great inspiration.
[Mike Simmons]
People say he invented the Dobsonian telescope. He didn’t really, but he popularized it because it’s sort of like, you know, somebody did something before someone else, but they didn’t tell anybody. It just, it doesn’t have any impact.
It doesn’t count. You know, you have to publish it or something. And so he’s huge.
And, and I heard him say also that he never liked the names like Newtonian and Cassegrain. He didn’t think these should be named after people. And he said, I’m the last person that telescope design should be named for.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah. He says like, no, I didn’t, I didn’t invent this. It’s like a cannon.
It goes up and down when it goes around, when you swing it around, it’s like, it wasn’t new.
[Mike Simmons]
But before John, I was very involved in the Los Angeles Astronomical Society in the seventies into the eighties, some, but way back there. And we wanted to do the same sort of thing, but we just were clued us about it at the time. So we, we have a public announcement that we’re going to have a star party in a dark sky location an hour and a half away.
And, you know, almost nobody came. I mean, it’s great if you can do that, but the first thing is to show people the moon or something like that. And nobody did that.
And also when I started going to even my first trip to Iran was 1999, chasing eclipses. They’d asked what amateur astronomers do in the U S. And for the most part, I said, well, they’re doing astrophotos or observing.
And there, there wasn’t outreach like this. Now it is far and away more, especially in other places. That’s what people do.
And I’ve seen people doing outreach in astronomy without a telescope. And you just want to tell people what’s going on.
[Ron Rosano]
Yeah. The opportunities and methods now, instead of having everybody have to get in line and have, you know, half a minute at an eyepiece, you can use a CCD image imager on the telescope, connected to a display. And, you know, many people can see what the telescope is seeing all at once.
[Mike Simmons]
Yeah. Yeah. So Ron, what is, what is next for you?
You’re going to stick around on earth for a while, or are you going to get in your spaceship and take off again?
[Ron Rosano]
I would love to go in orbit if that’s, that’s ever an opportunity. I was really hoping that the space perspective would come through with these balloon flights, high altitude balloon flights where you can, you’re under a black sky and can really see curvature of the earth and the, and be above most, most of the atmosphere. Yeah.
It didn’t work out for worldview or for space perspective. There’s a couple of other companies, I think one in France that’s still working on it, but that’s a great way to get a sense of the planet that you can’t from the ground. So if one of those opportunities comes up, it would be nice.
Yeah. I think for me now is not so much, not really so much trying to make it about my experience, but just to tell students that they could be part of it, that this is a new era and really get the, like the fundamental messages that, you know, we are on this planet together. We’re on a spaceship, but what we’re occupied with in our day-to-day thinking and our needs, you know, it doesn’t really relate to us taking care of our spaceship, you know?
So I’m really open, really aiming to kind of help break down that disconnect and have people be aware of the planet, of the existence of this incredibly thin atmosphere. And that, you know, there’s, there’s a really, really a need for us to work together and work like a crew on a spaceship.
[Mike Simmons]
And it’s been a thing for a long time in the space community. We go to space for Earth, not just to go up and have fun, but there are reasons for doing that, just the same as there are reasons for looking up, for doing astronomy. And this podcast is a way to tell people how astronomy is important and what is being done with it around the world, which is the mission of Astronomy for Equity.
So astronaut Ron, Ron Rosado, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your views. Carry on. Yeah, it’s great work.
Thank you and, and same, same with you. We, we do what we can. This has been another episode of Big Impact Astronomy.
I’m your host, Mike Simmons. Jacob Sager is our technical producer. Our audio engineer is Ali Pelfrey.
Big Impact Astronomy is produced by Astronomy for Equity, bringing astronomy to unserved communities worldwide. This episode of Big Impact Astronomy was brought to you by Primalucha Labs. Primalucha Labs makes space exploration accessible for all and empowers communities worldwide through innovative educational astronomy solutions.
Learn more about Astronomy for Equity, including how you can support us at astro4equity.org.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Planetary Science Institute. Audio post production by me, Richard Drumm, project management by Avivah Yamani, and hosting donated by libsyn.com. This content is released under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Please share what you love but don’t sell what’s free.
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Until next time let the stars guide your curiosity