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 five stories of animals taking flight.

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AirSpace is made possible by the generous support of Olay.

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 them on the ground, even with radio, was arduous and provided incomplete data. So even if it wasn’t perfect Monique’s tracking was a huge breakthrough.

Today, ecologists like the ones at Smithsonian’s Movement of Life Initiative and the ICARUS project track animals from pole to pole and from the tops of mountains to deep under the sea. Insights from these trackers help with habitat conservation and breeding but might also be able to predict the next pandemic. On this episode of AirSpace, we talk to some of the scientists who use space to track animals here on Earth.

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AirSpace is made possible by the generous support of Olay.

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 the way we view this beautiful gas giant.

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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 hired their first Black flight attendant, but these women continued to face discrimination and their representation in the industry hardly mirrored the overall population. On today’s episode, we explore the history of Black women flight attendants by hearing directly from some of the first to serve.

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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, some even rose to the level of heroism. On today’s episode, Emily and Matt take you through the history of this often overlooked military asset and tell the story of one hero bird, Cher Ami.

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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 and translate it into something that's better than what our naked eyes can see. And we discuss how these images are made even more accessible through detailed alt-text, 3D printing, and sonification.

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AirSpace is made possible by the generous support of Olay.

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 contributed to a complete redesign of how big we know our universe to be and what we think it looks like.

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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. In fact, it’s one of Emily’s favorite movies! Join us, as we journey to the center of the Earth.

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AirSpace is made possible by the generous support of Olay.

Season 7 of AirSpace will be in your feeds starting December 8th!

AirSpace is made possible by the generous support of Olay.

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 WWII. He was five years old.

Look for more episodes of PORTRAITS wherever you get your podcasts!