With massive budget cuts to NASA, claims that we’ve found alien life, and an important anniversary coming up, it’s time once more to talk about Space! My guests, therefore, are space archaeologist Dr Alice Gorman aka Dr Space Junk, and astrophysicist Rami Mandow.
In this episode we celebrate the anniversary of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, we discuss how Donald Trump’s budget cuts will affect space research, and we discuss fast radio bursts, the overview effect, and why Mars is a shithole.
This episode was originally posted as “The 9pm Controversial Alien Discovery and Budget Cuts with Dr Alice Gorman and Rami Mandow” but that misses out the entire reason for posting it this weekend.
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Alice Gorman (born 1964) FSA is an Australian archaeologist, heritage consultant, and lecturer, who is best known for pioneering work in the field of space archaeology and her Space Age Archaeology blog.
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Astronomer, driving The DishđĄ to study pulsars in my PhD. Also, founded SpaceAustralia.com. Also, love a bit of astrophotography. Also, do everything with my little mate, Max. Also, Ultra-Gay. He/Him.
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[15 April 2025] A star-studded crew of six women has successfully launched into space and touched back down to Earth, all in about 10 minutes. The event was for Blue Origin, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, whose fiancee Lauren Sanchez joined celebrities, including Katy Perry, on board for the first all-female space crew in more than 60 years.
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Blue Origin NS-31 was a sub-orbital spaceflight operated by Blue Origin as part of New Shepard, the company's space tourism program. The flight took place on April 14, 2025, and lasted 10 minutes and 21 seconds. The flight carried all female passengers and was organized by journalist Lauren Sånchez, fiancée of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos. She was joined by Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn, Gayle King, Amanda Nguyen and Katy Perry.
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Vostok 6 (Russian: ĐĐŸŃŃĐŸĐș-6, lit.â'Orient 6' or 'East 6') was the first human spaceflight to carry a woman, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, into space.
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Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova (born 6 March 1937) is a Russian engineer, member of the State Duma, and former Soviet cosmonaut. She was the first woman in space, having flown a solo mission on Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963.
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Two Russian cosmonauts, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, and Valeri Bykovski walking down the steps of the aircraft onto the red carpet for the long walk to the greetings. Pan, crowds waving and applauding...
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[13 June 2022] Every year on June 16, the anniversary of Dr Valentina Tereshkova's spaceflight, where she became the first women ever to leave Earth, I generally do some social media around the event. And there's always a barrage of (mostly) men trying to take her down. Many of them are Russian. All of them spout misogynist clichés as old as time. Sometimes I engage, sometimes I don't. It depends on my mood.
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Oldest living person to ever go to space, William Shatner, tries to explain the majesty of space while Jeff Bezos shakes up a bottle of champagne. Shatner clearly is uninterested.
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The overview effect is a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have characterized the effect as "a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus". The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the Earth from space are appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole.
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The Blue Marble is a photograph of Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by either Ron Evans or Harrison Schmitt aboard the Apollo 17 spacecraft on its way to the Moon. Viewed from around 29,400Â km (18,300Â mi) from Earth's surface, a cropped and rotated version has become one of the most reproduced images in history
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Earthrise is a photograph of Earth and part of the Moon's surface that was taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. Nature photographer Galen Rowell described it as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken".
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Edgar Dean "Ed" Mitchell was a United States Navy officer and aviator, test pilot, aeronautical engineer, ufologist, and NASA astronaut. As the Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 14 in 1971 he spent nine hours working on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro Highlands region, and was the sixth person to walk on the Moon. He was the second Freemason to set foot on the Moon, after Buzz Aldrin... The legacy of his post-NASA scientific and parapsychology work is carried on through the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
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[30 May 2025] Mars is an obvious shithole that looks like the least appealing disused quarry on Earth... But of course, the point of Mars is that it would be the place of Elon, Teslamandias, king of kings. And you know, I feel more confident than ever that we could all look upon his works and despair.
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[18 June 2003] Russia put the first woman into space four decades ago, but has since ignored them because of a male-dominated space program, former and current cosmonauts say.
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A transformative new collection from the award-winning author of Only the Animals... A team of tamponauts sets off on a perilous mission to Mars inspired by the courage of their predecessors.
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[15 May 2025] The premise of The Tamponauts is that, in 1982, NASA thought astronaut Sally Ride would require 100 tampons for the seven days she would be in orbit. For a mission where every gram counted, the suggestion that she would need such a comically large endowment of tampons was a measure of just how terrifying a womanâs period was to NASAâs engineers.
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[21 April 2025] Back in 2023, [researchers in Cambridge] had published what the peer-reviewed paper described as âpotential signsâ of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a chemical produced on Earth by plankton, and therefore a possible âbiosignatureâ, betraying the presence of life on a small world called K2-18b in orbit around a red dwarf star 124 light-years away.
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In astronomy and astrobiology, the habitable zone (HZ), or more precisely the circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ), is the range of orbits around a star within which a planetary surface can support liquid water given sufficient atmospheric pressure... Due to the importance of liquid water to Earth's biosphere... it is considered by many to be a major factor of planetary habitability, and the most likely place to find extraterrestrial liquid water and biosignatures elsewhere in the universe. The habitable zone is also called the Goldilocks zone, a metaphor, allusion and antonomasia of the children's fairy tale of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears".
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The Black Cloud is a 1957 science fiction novel by British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. It details the arrival of an enormous cloud of gas that enters the Solar System and appears about to destroy most of the life on Earth by blocking the Sun's radiation... The cloud unexpectedly decelerates as it approaches and comes to rest around the Sun, causing disastrous climatic changes on Earth and immense mortality and suffering for the human race. As the behaviour of the cloud proves to be impossible to predict scientifically, the team at Nortonstowe eventually come to the conclusion that it might be a life-form with a degree of intelligence. The scientists try to communicate with the cloud, and succeed.
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The peryton is a fictional hybrid animal combining the physical features of a stag and a bird. The peryton was invented by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1957 Book of Imaginary Beings, using the fictional device of a supposedly long-lost medieval manuscript.
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In radio astronomy, perytons are short man-made radio signals of a few milliseconds resembling fast radio bursts (FRB). A peryton differs from radio frequency interference by the fact that it is a pulse of several to tens of millisecond duration which sweeps down in frequency. They are further verified by the fact that they occur at the same time in many beams, indicating that they come from Earth, whereas FRBs occur in only one or two of the beams, indicating that they are of galactic origin.
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[5 May 2015] Australian scientists first detected interference in 1998, which they assumed was from lightning strikes, but earlier this year they finally found the real culprit.
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In radio astronomy, a fast radio burst (FRB) is a transient radio wave of length ranging from a fraction of a millisecond, for an ultra-fast radio burst, to 3 seconds, caused by a high-energy astrophysical process as yet not understood. Astronomers estimate the average FRB releases as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun puts out in three days.
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[29 May 2024] In 2007 we were part of a team that discovered the so-called ``Lorimer Burst'', the first example of a new class of objects now known as fast radio bursts (FRBs). These enigmatic events are only a few ms in duration and occur at random locations on the sky at a rate of a few thousand per day. Several thousand FRBs are currently known. [See top right to download the PDF.]
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This gallery shows the radio light signal from a new kind of transient astronomical object called "Fast Radio Burst" (or FRB). To help understand the radio light signal, it has been translated to a sound. These "sonifications" of the data, along with the dynamic spectra shown visually, are shown nine bursts from the repeating fast radio burst, FRB 121102, as seen by the Very Large Array. [This video contains nine bursts, but I only played five on the podcast.]
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The Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST) is a radio telescope operating at 843Â MHz. It is operated by the School of Physics of the University of Sydney. The telescope is located in Hoskinstown, near the Molonglo River and Canberra, and was constructed by modification of the eastâwest arm of the former Molonglo Cross Telescope, a larger version of the Mills Cross Telescope. Construction of the original "Super Cross" telescope with 1.6-kilometre arms began in 1960 by Professor Bernard Y. Mills. It became operational in 1967.
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A trebuchet (French: trébuchet) is a type of catapult that uses a hinged arm with a sling attached to the tip to launch a projectile. It was a common powerful siege engine until the advent of gunpowder. The design of a trebuchet allows it to launch projectiles of greater weights and further distances than a traditional catapult.
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Between 1595 and 1598, Galileo devised and improved a geometric and military compass suitable for use by gunners and surveyors. This expanded on earlier instruments designed by NiccolĂČ Tartaglia and Guidobaldo del Monte. For gunners, it offered, in addition to a new and safer way of elevating cannons accurately, a way of quickly computing the charge of gunpowder for cannonballs of different sizes and materials.
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From the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
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As per the manuscript, the idea was to strap bags of early explosives on to a cat taken from the city under siege, bring it close to the city walls, and set it on fire. The unfortunate, flaming rocket cats would try to hide, usually in a familiar home or under a pile of hay. In the process, they would ignite anything flammable on their way there. Needless to say, this rarely ended well for the poor rocket cats.
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[3 May 2025] Donald Trump is planning to scrap key programs aimed at getting humans back to the moon. The US President appears to be instead be prioritising a plan backed by Elon Musk.
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[5 May 2025] FOX 13's Craig Patrick shares the big changes coming to the Kennedy Space Center as President Trump is proposing major cuts to NASA's funding.
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The Artemis program is a Moon exploration program led by the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), formally established in 2017 via Space Policy Directive 1. The program's stated long-term goal is to establish a permanent base on the Moon to facilitate human missions to Mars.
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NASA, in coordination with the U.S. Department of State and seven other initial signatory nations, established the Artemis Accords in 2020. Â With many countries and private companies conducting missions and operations around the Moon, the Artemis Accords provide a common set of principles to enhance the governance of the civil exploration and use of outer space... On May 15, 2025, Norway became the 55th nation to sign the accords.
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[8 June 2025] The White House had requested huge cuts to the space agency's budget, which would see funding for science projects cut by nearly a half.
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[9 June 2025] Iâve had some questions about the FY26 budget. Hereâs the proposed budgetâs impact on the Heliophysics fleet. Bold red: canceled. Regular red: reduced. Orange: reduced & transferred. No mark: continues. Voyager will be canceled under this plan.
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NASA's budget peaked during the Apollo program in the 1960s. After the United States won the race to the Moon, space exploration lost political support, and NASA's budget was cut significantly. Since the 1970s, NASA has accounted for, on average, 0.71% of annual U.S. government spending. Since the 2010s, that value has been between 0.4% and 0.3%.
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How will the Universe end? What will happen to everything that was and everything that will be? Dr Katie Mack returns to Australia this July to explore the final days of everything, with a series of events in Sydney and Melbourne.
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[19 March 2025] Last year, an enormous map of the cosmos hinted that the engine driving cosmic expansion might be sputtering. Now physicists are back with an even bigger map, and a stronger conclusion.
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