2025 NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Symposium: Part 1 — Lunar glass and starshades

Each year, NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program (NIAC) funds visionary ideas that could shape the future of space exploration. In this first of two episodes from the 2025 NIAC Symposium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, Planetary Radio host Sarah Al-Ahmed introduces some of the concepts presented at this year’s event.

You’ll hear from Martin Bermudez and Josh Simpson from Skyeports LLC. Bermudez is the company’s CEO and principal investigator for the LUNGS Project, and Simpson is a glass artist and co-investigator. Together, their team is exploring how to build glass-blown lunar habitats from melted Moon dust. You’ll also meet Christine Gregg, research engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center, who’s developing architected metamaterials to stabilize giant space structures. And finally, John Mather, Nobel laureate and senior astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, shares his team’s work on an inflatable starshade that could help us see Earth-like worlds around distant stars.

Then stick around for What’s Up with Dr. Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society.

Related Links

• NIAC Symposium - NASA
• Watch the 2025 NIAC Symposium webcast
• Lunar Glass Structure (LUNGS): Enabling Construction of Monolithic Habitats in Low-Gravity
• Dynamically Stable Large Space Structures via Architected Metamaterials
• Inflatable Starshade for Earthlike Exoplanets
• Buy a Planetary Radio T-Shirt
• The Planetary Society shop
• The Night Sky
• The Downlink