I’m recording this on March 5. At this point in time, there is no new NASA administrator and we continue to live in the liminal space where the massive layoff that have struck so many Federal Agencies are still somehow only touching the edges of Space Science. We seen our cousins at USGS and NOAA face restrictions on conference travel and what research they can present. So far, however, layoffs have only hit the Jet Propulsion Lab, and while grant slowdowns and cuts are happening, and there are delays in funding, space science is somehow still moving forward.
As Erik will talk about more, we’ve seen Firefly Aerospace successfully land on the Moon and there have been mixed results from the launch of 3 moon-destined missions, Oden, Trailblazer, and Athena. Tomorrow we may see another Moon landing… or not… and I’ll record a bonus scene before this goes live to let you know what happened.
It all feels a bit too good to be true, and I’m afraid to pinch myself in case I wake up.
If you have helped make this happen by calling your congress people. Thank you. If you want to help keep this happening… please call your congress people. Space exploration leads to unexpected breakthroughs – like the invention of Wifi – and it gives us something to learn when we need the sky to no longer be our limit.
In this episode, we’re going to look so very far beyond Earth. We will explore black holes across over a million galaxies, and look at star formation in the Milky Way and the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. In our closer look, we’re going to explore Mars and look at just how often rocks fall out of the Red Planet’s sky.