We’re only ONE month away from the Perseverance Rover touching down on Mars! The search for life is a pillar of Mars exploration. But our search isn’t only confined to the planets of our solar system. Radio telescopes search for signals of intelligent life from far away planets, orbiting other stars. One such telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, collapsed on December 1, 2020. In his story, “The Great Silence,” science fiction author Ted Chiang features the telescope as he considers the significance of the animal life that surrounds it.

About Voyages to Mars: On July 30, 2020 NASA’s Perseverance Rover launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida to Jezero Crater, Mars. To accompany Percy on seven-month journey, we’re compiling a literary mixtape of Martian-themed sci-fi set to music by DJ Kid Koala. Voyages to Mars is made possible by the support of the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian Orlando Regional Council.

Season four of AirSpace is just around the corner, but we have a special bonus drop for you today!

Our friends at the PBS podcast NOVA Now have been giving us a behind-the- scenes look at the work of scientists, engineers, technologists, and more who are using their work to address the most pressing questions of our time. Listen to this episode where host Alok Patel explores how satellites have shaped our understanding of the modern world, and what lies ahead at the intersection of justice and space.

Look for NOVA Now wherever you get your podcasts or visit them at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/podcast/.

What a year it has been (alt: Ugh, what a year!). Back in April, we launched our AirSpace Movie Club—and critiquing our favorite air-and-space-films was a fun way to stay in touch remotely until we could get back into the studio for Season 3. Well, 16 episodes and eight months later, we’re still recording from home, so we thought we’d end season 3 back where we started: at the movies!

It’s safe to say that the AirSpace pod loves Galaxy Quest, but doesn’t everyone!? It has it all: sci-fi, action, and comedy, an underdog who saves the day, and feel good story with space aliens! For the Trekkies among us, it’s an unswerving love letter to the importance of fans in any successful franchise. In the final episode of season 3, Emily, Matt, and Nick discuss why this is the movie to watch with your family this holiday season.

Also! We’ll be baaaaack! This is the end of season 3, but we won’t be gone for long! We have a few tricks up our sleeve in January (and Voyages to Mars continues!). And then, we’ll be back before you know it in February! See? So soon!!

Interplanetary road trips take a WHILE. So for this episode of Voyages to Mars, while we cruise onward towards the Red Planet, we’re listening to some poetry that pays tribute to long duration space travel. Our selections in this episode come from Orrery, a brand-new collection from author Donna Kane that pays homage to the Pioneer 10 space probe launched by NASA in 1972. Kane was inspired by Pioneer 10 to explore themes of consciousness, materiality, and transformation.

About Voyages to Mars: On July 30, 2020 NASA’s Perseverance Rover launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida to Jezero Crater, Mars. To accompany Percy on seven-month journey, we’re compiling a literary mixtape of Martian-themed sci-fi set to music by DJ Kid Koala. Voyages to Mars is made possible by the support of the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian Orlando Regional Council.

Did you learn the constellations as a child? Odds are, if you lived in a city, you saw more stars in the classroom—or a planetarium if you were lucky—than by looking at the night sky (and if not, we’re jealous). Fact is, most of us live in places that give us a less than ideal view of the stars because of light pollution from our cities and suburbs. But keeping our skies dark is important for so many reasons – for nocturnal animals, for science and astronomy, and for cultural traditions around the world. In this episode, we’re shining a light on the cultural importance of the night sky for native Hawaiians. Turn down the lights and enjoy!  

This month marks the 20th birthday of the International Space Station! That’s 240 straight months—which is exactly how long 2020 feels so far. We all need a little self-care these days, so in honor of the ISS anniversary, we’ll tell you about what astronaut life is like when they aren’t doing the extraordinary science, essential maintenance, and extraterrestrial chores necessary to sustain our home in space. Believe it or not, astronauts get days off too! Find out how they spend their downtime on this episode of AirSpace.

We’re back with the fourth installment of our literary mixtape, Voyages to Mars! The Perseverance Rover is on its way to the Red Planet and space agencies around the world hope that someday in the not too distant future, humans will join it. Mars is a popular destination for humans in sci-fi literature. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, published a few years before the world’s first satellite was even launched (!), remains one of the most influential stories of human settlement on Mars ever published. In two selections from the Chronicles  – “The Settlers” and “The Green Morning” – Bradbury considers what the motivation for settling Mars might be, what those first human settlers might be like, and how they might transform Mars into something more in line with life as we know it on Earth.

About Voyages to Mars: On July 30, 2020 NASA’s Perseverance Rover launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida to Jezero Crater, Mars. To accompany Percy on seven-month journey, we’re compiling a literary mixtape of Martian-themed sci-fi set to music by DJ Kid Koala. Voyages to Mars is made possible by the support of the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian Orlando Regional Council.

THE SETTLERS and THE GREEN MORNING from THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES © 1950, renewed 1977 by Ray Bradbury; Broadcast by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. on behalf of Ray Bradbury Literary Works LLC.

On this episode of AirSpace we’re spotlighting the heroic service and enduring legacy of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP. More than 1000 of these fearless women flew as civilians for the Army Air Forces during World War II. These skilled pilots performed jobs on the home front – ferrying planes, towing targets, transporting personnel – flying almost every type of military aircraft. Yet despite filling a crucial wartime role, these women weren’t recognized as veterans for more than 30 years. And their campaign to be permitted burial in Arlington National Cemetery lasted even longer.  In this episode, we’re welcoming our first ever guest host, historian and author Dr. Katherine Sharp Landdeck. And we’ll hear firsthand from three women connected to the WASP legacy, including a WASP herself, Nell “Mickey” Bright.

Can 650 episodes of a tv show fix society’s deepest, ugliest ills? Maybe not, but it turns out that it’s a pretty good place to start a conversation. We’re all fans of something—movies, tv shows, video games, comic books, sports teams, you name it!—and that can help us connect with new people with shared interests and frames of reference. In this episode, we’re talking about how and why fan communities form, and what happens when the barrier to entry turns toxic and targeted. “Fandoms” aren’t new—they stretch back at least a century in their modern form—but the internet provided a new kind of platform for geeking out, and unfortunately, for airing underlying and overt biases. Misogyny, racism, agism, ableism—all of the problems we struggle with as a society at large happen in fan spaces, but fandoms also create opportunities to connect across divisions. We’ll talk to Blerdcon co-founder Hilton George about creating a dedicated space for the Black nerd experience, and journalist and This American Life producer Bim Adewunmi about the obstacles for engaging with each other through our favorite media—and how we can do better. It’s gatekeeping and pulling down barriers—today on AirSpace.

We're back with the third installment of our literary mixtape, Voyages to Mars! Humans aren't yet able to go to Mars ourselves, so we’re reliant on the help of rovers and landers to be our eyes and ears on the surface - our mechanical “boots on the ground.” This episode is our ode to ROBOTS!

Our two stories today come from a time before the word “robot” had even entered our vocabulary. L. Frank Baum (of Wizard of Oz fame) introduces us to a wind-up man named Tik-Tok in Ozma of Oz. And in The Steam Man of the Prairies, author Edward Ellis sets his steam powered man against the backdrop of the industrialization of the American West.

About Voyages to Mars: On July 30, 2020 NASA's Perseverance rover launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida to Jezero Crater, Mars. To accompany Percy on its seven-month journey, we're compiling a literary mixtape of Martian-themed sci-fi set to music by DJ Kid Koala.

Voyages to Mars is made possible by the support of the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian Orlando Regional Council.