All Stories

If you’ve flown commercial, you’re familiar with the preflight safety spiel. On this episode, Emily, Matt, and Nick dive into the history of the inflight safety briefing to better understand the evolution from straight-forward instruction to Hollywood production, and an expert in cabin safety weighs in on whether these flashy videos  actually make air travel safer.

Any child of the 80s or 90s knows about Space Camp. But, what’s its origin story? And how did it become such a part of the millennial zeitgeist? (Even Mary Kate and Ashley solved a Space Camp mystery—spoiler alert: it was woodpeckers). Emily, Matt, and Nick break it down.

Every year in Russia during the week of April 12, the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight in space, also known as Cosmonautics Day, one hears Gagarin’s March replayed on radio and websites. The musical piece paints a picture of a bright and enthusiastic trek into the Soviet future with Gagarin at the lead.

For many, their knowledge of Sally Ride begins and ends at her NASA career and the title of the first American woman in space. After she retired from NASA, Sally Ride utilized her groundbreaking status to launch a variety of business ventures (including Space.com and Sally Ride Science) which would inspire the next generation of astronauts and scientists.

It took decades of research, lobbying, and litigation to prove the dangers of secondhand smoke, and a lot of that work happened at cruising altitude. In this episode, we’ll hear how flight attendants were instrumental in the fight to get smoking OUT of the skies, and how the lawsuit they brought against the tobacco companies had huge ripple effects in the smoke-free public places we enjoy today.

In 1897 author H.G. Wells imagined a different way to see Mars in his short shorty, “The Crystal Egg." Writing around the same time as his famous novel, “War of the Worlds,” he introduces us to two humans who discover a mysterious egg-shaped crystal that allows them to view the surface of Mars – and the strange creatures that inhabit it.

On January 28, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger was set to launch on STS-51-L, on a mission to observe and track Halley’s Comet—73 seconds after launch, the shuttle disintegrated, ending the lives of all seven crew members. The disaster was most heavily felt in the space community and even in the realm of the cultural arts. Particularly, famed science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke and astronaut Sally K. Ride had their own respective responses to this tragedy.

Seventy-three seconds after launch, Challenger was destroyed on live TV. We did not understand what we saw: Our teachers could not explain it, our parents were unlikely to have better answers, and few of us probably spent time paying attention to what transpired afterwards in terms of the official investigation. The Challenger disaster symbolizes a moment in our personal and shared memories when we felt great sorrow together.

Over the summer we collaborated with the artist Diplo on a companion album to his new record MMXX. It’s called Under Ancient Skies and it’s available wherever you stream music. But we also created an audio tour of the night sky for a series of small, outdoor concerts Diplo performed.

After the 1950s, fictional depictions of space travel needed to suggest conceivable ways to cross interstellar distances to seem plausible. Some authors suggested faster-than-light drives, hyper drives, jump drives, worm holes, and black holes.