Podcast

On this week’s StarTalk Radio podcast, Neil deGrasse Tyson interviewed William Shatner (aka Captain Kirk) about his acting career and recent trip into space on a Blue Origin rocket. If you saw the Amazon Prime show called Shatner in Space, you have seen the Blue Origin drama (or the infomercial, if you prefer). In his chat with Dr. Tyson, you learn more about this short voyage, including his reluctance to go on the second rocket trip rather than the first, his uneasy stomach once in space, and the travails of being the oldest “astronaut.”

It is always fun to hear from the man who helped to create a growing interest in space travel from his first days as Captain James T. Kirk on Star Trek back in the mid-1960s. We need both scientists and science fiction to keep the dream alive. And just as Neil deGrasse Tyson has stepped into the shoes of Carl Sagan on Cosmos, we have seen Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard and others step into the shoes of Mr. Shatner on Star Trek. Hopefully, we can continue to create such spirited pairings in the years to come.

If you are looking for a new podcast, or just want to listen to an interesting conversation, I recommend BBC’s recent Inside Science episode about human travel to the Moon and Mars. Titled “A New Space Age?,” the December 30, 2021 episode discusses NASA’s Artemis lunar program, the timetable for travel to Mars, and whether or not we even need to send humans into space.

Dr. Kevin Fong leads a panel of experts to discuss these topics:

— Dr. Mike Barratt, a senior NASA astronaut and medical doctor based at the Johnson Space Center;

— Dr. Anita Sengupta, Research Associate Professor in Engineering at the University of Southern California; and

— Oliver Morton, Briefings editor at the Economist and author of several books on the Moon and Mars.

If you enjoy the conversation, you may want to look around a few of the other episodes as well, such as the December 16, 2021 episode on the James Webb Space Telescope.