The Other Moonshot: The untold stories of Apollo’s Black engineers in Los Angeles

Sarah Al-Ahmed: The Apollo program took humanity to the moon, but not everyone who helped us get there got the recognition that they deserved, this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of The Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. This episode, we're joined by Joanne Higgins, host of the podcast LA Made: The Other Moonshot. She shares the powerful and largely untold stories of Black engineers who helped send astronauts to the moon while navigating systemic racism back here on earth. Then, a quick update from Casey Dreier, our chief of space policy on the latest developments impacting NASA's future. And in What's Up, Bruce Betts and I explore some of the Apollo era innovations that are still shaping the technologies that we rely on today.

If you love Planetary Radio and want to stay informed about the latest space discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it. When we talk about the Apollo program, we often think of astronauts, rockets, and big moments of triumph, but the reality behind the success was far more complex, and some of the people who helped make it possible were left out of the history books. A new four-part podcast series from LAist Studios called LA Made: The Other Moonshot shares some of this untold history. It tells the stories of three Black aerospace engineers, Charlie Cheatham, Nate LeVert, and Shelby Jacobs, who helped send humans to the moon while facing racism, exclusion, and underrecognition in their daily lives and careers.

Before we jump into our conversation, a quick note. If you're going to listen to LA Made: The Other Moonshot, listener discretion is advised. The podcast we're about to discuss includes some strong language and references to discrimination and racism. These stories are real, powerful, and sometimes painful, but they are deeply important. Our guest today is Joanne Higgins, the host of The Other Moonshot. She brings a deeply personal lens to this story. Charlie Cheatham was a close family friend who helped raise her. In the series, she explores the lives of these engineers, the technical brilliance they brought to the Apollo missions, and the discrimination they faced within the aerospace industry. Thanks, Joanne, for joining us.

Joanne Higgins: Thank you so much for having me. It's another delightful pleasure to talk about space.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And wonderful to have another podcaster on the show and such a unique story that you're telling here. This podcast shines a light on the often overlooked contributions of Black engineers in the Apollo program, particularly in the Los Angeles area near where I live. But this is also a very personal thing for you, and in more than one way. What inspired you to tell Charlie Cheatham's story?

Joanne Higgins: Growing up with him and hearing a little bit as I was growing up about what he did without really comprehending it, and then later on as an adult in 2016 visiting him and one of his colleagues, one of his friends and colleague dropped by and they started talking about the Apollo moonshots. And I realized that had not been something that I had retained. So I was fascinated listening to them talk about it and thinking, oh my goodness, I had no idea I was connected with somebody that actually worked on the Apollo program and I had my cell phone at the time, and I taped their conversation.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I didn't even begin to really dive into the experiences of Black Americans during the Apollo program until last year. I was working with National Geographic. They made this documentary called The Space Race, and it was about specifically this topic, and one of the people I got to speak with was Ed Dwight, who was supposed to become the first Black astronaut and didn't get to do that in the aftermath of JFK's assassination, but then last year finally got to go to space and it's beautiful seeing that kind of arc from where we were during the Apollo program to where we are now. Even though there's still so much left to be done when it comes to making everyone feel safe within the space community, it has developed quite a bit over the last 60 years.

Joanne Higgins: There's been a lot of development and yes, I actually know Ed.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's wonderful.

Joanne Higgins: Yes, Ed and my godfather, Charlie, knew each other. Ed was one of the people that I talked to. When Charlie gave me names, he said, "Oh, there's other people you should talk to." And he gave me Ed's number and I've had a couple of chats with Ed. I bought his book. I don't know if you're familiar with his book, wonderful self-published, it's amazing. And they let me know before it happened that he was going to be going up in space finally. It was a little quiet, and they didn't tell me who he was going up with so I heard it on the news like everyone else. But just like you said, this arc of coming full circle and going up especially after the journey he had, especially with the aerospace program, it's like karmic.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It really is. So you're connected to Charlie Cheatham personally, but there are two other people that you tell the stories of in this podcast, Nate LeVert and Shelby Jacobs. Can you tell us a little bit about what they did for the Apollo program just more broadly?

Joanne Higgins: Sure. Charlie developed a process called configuration management. It was a numbered system that they used to identify plane parts first, and then they used it for being able to identify spacecraft parts because the idea was you go up in space and if something happens to it up there, there's no way to know unless the pieces can be tracked by numbers, which piece we're talking about, and what it does. So Charlie actually developed that system for the Apollo program.

Nate LeVert worked on the Apollo rocket propellant system. So he did that on most of the Apollos. And of course, that's what makes the rocket go. And Shelby Jacobs is very well known. He developed a camera system that was mounted on Apollo 6. When it went up, they wanted to get a photo of the separation. In taking that photo of the separation, it also took a photo of what became, at the time, one of the first photos of the curvature of Earth. So that was a wonderful contribution. They all made incredible contributions to the industry.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I loved that detail about Apollo 6 because everyone in the space community who's deeply embedded in it has seen those images, but that extra context of just how complicated it was, they literally had to eject a camera off of the spacecraft into the ocean and go retrieve it just to see whether or not stage separation happened correctly. That's wild.

Joanne Higgins: Exactly, exactly, yes. And Shelby, he was given that task. He talked about how he was given tasks that people felt he would fail at, which just encouraged him to achieve more. So the fact that that photo became iconic is again, just a tribute to the tenacity that these men had.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, you said earlier that you had heard all these stories from Charlie growing up, but it didn't really click with you how important they were. At what point did you realize that his story and the stories of Black engineers in the Apollo program more broadly deserved this wider audience and they hadn't been highlighted in the way that they should be?

Joanne Higgins: Well, I reflected, when I heard Charlie and his friend talking, I flashed back on my education about the Apollo program, and I remember there was nothing ever said about minorities or people of color in the program. So then, to find out I have this connection, I thought, well, wait. So there were Black people involved in the Apollo program? And that caused me to research. I really love history and I love LA history. I'm an old Hollywood film fanatic as well. So I started digging into what made LA LA, and of course the film industry did. But then, I found out that the second industry was the aerospace industry, especially for people of color. So when I connected all that together, I just was like, okay, I didn't know this. So I set out and asked other people, just people I hung out with, I'd go, "Hey, did you know Black people worked on the Apollo?" Almost everyone I asked in my circle did not know that, and I thought I could do something about that.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I think a lot of people only first began thinking about this when the movie Hidden Figures came out. I think that story was really pivotal in reframing this, but it's beautiful seeing more and more of these stories being told.

Joanne Higgins: I agree, and you were so right about the Hidden Figures aspect because every time I start talking to someone about what it is, they immediately go, "Yeah, like Hidden Figures." And I'm just like, "Yes, kind of, except very LA centric." Yeah, which makes it kind of stand on its own.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. There's just so much history to aerospace in Los Angeles that I think a lot of people don't appreciate, and I've only gotten to know more about it as being a person in this field in the city, but there is so much history there, and it continues to evolve as more and more of these commercial space companies open up in this area. But we also have NASA facilities like JPL and so many observatories and aerospace companies all concentrated together. It really is the way I think about LA. It's as entrenched into this city as any Hollywood walk of fame is for me.

Joanne Higgins: Well, as for me as well, because the other things that I learned about it was that it was instrumental in creating middle class communities in Los Angeles, which is something that Charlie benefited from, and in a way my family benefited from. I grew up in that community, which aerospace workers integrated because years prior to us being in Compton, it was redlined and Black people couldn't live there. So the aerospace industry really ignited so many things for minorities in the city.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Part of what enabled that was in 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed this executive order that required government contractors to take affirmative action to make sure that they would hire people from all walks of life, and it didn't matter what race they were or what nation they came from. How did that play a role in opening the doors for Black engineers and really ushering in this new age of more diversity within the space community?

Joanne Higgins: Well, it was the thing that opened it up because prior to that, there weren't very many Black people in defense, and this was now a government job. So what it meant for them was they suddenly had insurance and credit unions and they could get loans and they could buy houses. So it really just opened the floodgates, not to mention it could take advantage of some of their specific talents, like these men were all engineers and they were all educated as engineers. So if there hadn't have been this program, their education, it wouldn't have been a waste. But to be able to use that education to then send a man to the moon, well, it was just a phenomenal thing to have happen for men that grew up in the Jim Crow period.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But just because the door is open, does not mean you're welcome on the other side. These people were clearly skilled. They contributed some beautiful things to the Apollo program, but they faced a lot of discrimination on the other end once they started actually doing their work. How do you think they balanced their passion for aerospace and engineering with this racism they faced every day at work?

Joanne Higgins: Well, because they grew up in Jim Crow, they had learned very early on the dance of balance. So they definitely had that, and each one of them actually developed their own unique ways of dealing with the adversity because they experienced it really on a daily basis. And it was crushing, especially the knowledge that their white coworkers were getting paid more money than them. That was just something that, of course, crushed these men because they all had families, but they loved doing what they did.

Charlie developed a very aggressive, outgoing personality where he decided, I'm in this position, I'm going to try and make it better for the people behind me. So he was very confrontational and very direct in things that he saw. He was not a keep your head down type of person. Nate, because he'd grown up in Alabama, he was more of a watcher type person, and he became this incredible golf player, and NASA had a golf league where they traveled all over the world. And so, Nate traveled all over the world playing golf for NASA, and that is something that gave him a lot of pleasure along with being an engineer.

Shelby developed this wonderful talent of being an incredible bridge player, and that was pretty essential to staying in the know of what was happening because all the executives played bridge at lunchtime. And Shelby became very, very competitive to where he won lots of awards for playing bridge, and he beat a lot of executives, including the president at one point. So this is how these men showed up and got noticed with regard to these types of talents that they developed that helped just make it tolerable. And they loved their jobs.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: They definitely loved their jobs, and clearly they were fantastic at them, but Charlie especially had these very complicated feelings about the Apollo program, and you also show in this podcast that that sentiment was shared by a lot of the Black community during that time. You share these snippets of the famous poem, Whitey on the Moon, by Gil Scott-Heron, and many other things along the way. And I completely understand, like I hear the sentiment today rather frequently, like why should we be investing in space exploration when there are so many issues here on earth that we need to face? Issues of discrimination and inequality and climate change, all of these things.

The context is very different now because we have an established space sector, and it gives a lot to communities all around the world. But at the time, in the context of everyone fighting for civil rights, I absolutely understand how that dichotomy between the suffering of people here in the United States just felt so much more imbalanced in the context of seeing people and all the effort and the love and the passion that went into sending people to the moon. Do you think Charlie's sentiments toward it may have evolved in years since things have changed and the space community is a little more welcoming?

Joanne Higgins: Well, now when you say evolved, do you mean changed his opinion?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, I guess. I guess, yeah. But clearly he still has complicated feelings about it.

Joanne Higgins: Yeah, he still to this day has very complicated feelings about it. He doesn't feel enough has changed. One of the things that we've been connecting with as a result of the podcast at events, we've had young minority engineers come out and meet us and talk to us and share with us that it's a little different but not overly different. So when we hear that, then we recognize that it's slow.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Progress is slow. Even I, as an Arab-American woman, have gotten people being racist about my position within the space field. It is pervasive, but it is evolving over time. And even I've seen it change in just my brief amount of time in the space sector, but there's still a lot left to do, and I have to be very real with people when they ask me, "How do I get into the space community?" You've got to be upfront about it and be like, "These are the things that you might be facing, but this is why everyone should push through them and why your efforts could make a difference for the people that come after you."

Joanne Higgins: I couldn't agree more, and you've made me very curious. I'd love briefly to know how you got into space.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: With every person, it's a complex story that almost always starts with some kind of science fiction. But for me, there were some things in my childhood that were very difficult, and for me, space is a thing that gives context to our struggles and it gives comfort. When I think about the things that I faced in my life, I zoom out a little bit and I look at them in the context of what everyone else on earth is going through, what this planet means, what life itself means. And while that doesn't fix things, it does allow me to better understand myself and what I'm going through. And I think that was very powerful for me growing up and really gave me this drive. It made me see space as my vehicle for getting out and finding happiness and for spreading it to others and potentially for making a long-term change for everyone on the planet. So that's why I got into it and why I'm so passionate about it.

Joanne Higgins: Wow, that sounds really noble.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, everyone deals with the things they've been with in different ways. And I'm really happy to hear from so many people that space is the thing that gives them this context. But that's true of so many of the beautiful human endeavors, art, advocacy, just there are so many ways that we can deal with what it is to be human. And for me, it's space, but for others it's something else.

Joanne Higgins: Yes. And that is what is so joyful about even just this time is that there's a lot of different things that can give that to us.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Right. And more opportunities for people to participate in all of them. Every year that goes by, I just, I can't wait until we're, you even mentioned it, the Star Trek in the show. I cannot wait until we're at that future where it's just all of us on our starships, all of us in equality. My mom told me these stories about Star Trek when she was a kid, and what that did specifically for her understanding of diversity and inclusion, and particularly she spoke about Lieutenant Uhura on the ship and what her role did for her understanding of what it meant to be Black in the space community. She connects that directly to how she felt about watching people land on the moon. And I think that's probably true of a lot of people.

Joanne Higgins: I couldn't agree more. I loved Star Trek, and definitely seeing a Black woman at the helm was like, it made you really feel like, oh, you could be that.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Right.

Joanne Higgins: Yes. She did an amazing thing taking on that role. So all of us Black women are very grateful.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, we love you, Nichelle, wherever you are in the universe.

Joanne Higgins: Yes.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We do. Well, in episode two, Shelby uses this phrase spring-loaded to failure. And you brought this up a little bit earlier, this feeling that they were set up to fail. How did that express itself in the context of the aerospace community?

Joanne Higgins: They were often given the jobs that no one else really wanted, as I mentioned. As it turned out, that was great for them because when they would solve the problem or manage the situation, it was like, wow. Now, when they would do that and manage it, they did not get the accolades or the credit. In fact, very often the credit was taken away from them. So even when they succeeded, they didn't get the rewards you usually get when you succeed.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And there was this intense meeting in Huntsville, Alabama that you talk about in this where Nate presents his findings about this potentially catastrophic thermal tile and that this divot issue on the Apollo rockets. And when he presented this, despite doing this bit of work that potentially no one else wanted to do and could potentially save the lives of the astronauts on board, he presented this and the executives dismissed him. So even in that context, even when they're succeeding, they're still failing to communicate it to the people that need to take action despite the fact that it's not their fault.

Joanne Higgins: Exactly. And this was their environment daily, not just once or twice. Every day, they worked.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And there was that moment as well. You talk about the Apollo 1 disaster in this where unfortunately Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee lost their lives during this simulated countdown. And after that happened, there was a lot of scrutiny for everyone within the space community. But did they feel like a disproportionate amount of that scrutiny fell on them?

Joanne Higgins: No. At least I know Charlie did not... No, actually, none of them really felt that about it. I'd like to think they knew better to take that on. They were, of course, very upset about it happening, especially Nate, because one of those astronauts was a golf buddy of his. They were very aware of a lot of problems, and that there was this challenge between the engineers and NASA and money at the time.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That must have been a really hard thing for Nate. He would ultimately go on to win the Silver Snoopy Award. And we've had a few people on the show that have won the Silver Snoopy, and I've said this before it, I know it's named for Snoopy, beloved, but also this is a very prestigious award that we only give to people whose actions have saved or potentially saved the lives of our space travelers and everybody who works on that. And during the course of you talking to him, he downplays the significance of this to both you and everybody else around him. And it just strikes me how much a person has to go through in life to then be given an accolade like that and still not be able to internalize or be able to share what that truly means and how significant that is.

Joanne Higgins: Yes. You said it very well. When he told me, when I learned about it kind of as an afterthought, and I knew what it was, I just remember being like not even being able to move for a few minutes and say, "Nate, you never mentioned this." I had already interviewed him several times before I even found out. In fact, he didn't tell me. His daughter mentioned it to me, and I'm like, "You won a silver Snoopy?" So I was way more excited than Nate. But Nate was, and still is a very humble person. And he loved what he did. So that was just like, not icing on the cake, that was just a candle.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But he also laments a little bit in this podcast that he wishes that he did more. And in the context of that, I think he was saying that he wished he had done more to fight back against the discrimination he and his colleagues faced within that field. And I don't know him personally, so if you bump into him again, please, from all of us at the space community, like just to share with him that sometimes surviving is just enough and pushing past the boundaries that people have laid before you is something that helps the people that come after you, not just you. And I hope he someday internalizes that it's okay to not do everything in the universe all at once.

Joanne Higgins: That's wonderful. I will definitely share that with him because that is something he does lament about. Although I think I get the impression that now, now that he's told a story and it's exposed in so many areas thanks to public radio, that he feels like he's doing more.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But we definitely need to take the time to tell these stories of the people that worked on these programs while they're still with us. Because this was quite a long time ago that the Apollo program happened, and during your initial visit with Shelby Jacobs, which I believe was 2022?

Joanne Higgins: Yes.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It was only three months before Shelby sadly passed away of cancer. What was that like for you to spend this time with him in this pivotal moment, just beginning to tell his story, only to lose him just a few months later?

Joanne Higgins: I was devastated about what happened, mainly because it came as a surprise to me. I remember the day I went to visit Shelby, he was doing a lot of stuff. He had a plan. He wanted us to see so much stuff. There was so much information. And I remember at the time thinking, wow, but you know, we'll interview you again. And we'll... But he's like, "No, you've got to see this and you've got to see this." And I remember now thinking and being so grateful that he showed me so much and that I just finally just let go of what my agenda was on that day and allowed it to be Shelby's agenda. I'm just really happy that I did that because he was on fire that day. Just absolutely so much to tell. I didn't want to leave. I think we were there for like eight or nine hours.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Worth it.

Joanne Higgins: It was. And just every, so many just little elements of his life, his house was his aerospace career.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That must've been so special. That must've been just such a fun time wandering around, hearing his stories. And it must've been so exciting for him after all this time to finally be able to have an audience who wants to hear all these stories and to be able to share that after all of this, and feeling like he wasn't receiving the recognition that he deserved for it.

Joanne Higgins: Well, unlike the other two gentlemen, Shelby was a big self-promoter. So he had been honored by the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, the mayor. He'd been on panels and news. KTLA did a news thing on him. He had spoken at Columbia Space Museum several times, so he had been promoting himself and telling his story a lot already, which was great because I was able to access some of those things to fill in other things that I needed. So I was grateful that Shelby, he knew he had a story to tell and he started telling it on his own.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: As you were doing research for this, you collected the stories from the people directly, but how did you go about doing the historical deep dive and verifying what they were telling you about their experiences during that time?

Joanne Higgins: Well, I worked with a wonderful company, reasonable volume. This is what they do, and they put together a wonderful research team that really we would identify the different things we needed to know. I was not alone.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We've barely touched on any of the stories that are inside of this podcast. The experiences of blatant racism, the time during the riots in LA, the experiences that they had in the aftermath of the death of Martin Luther King. There are so many things in this podcast that you weave together so beautifully, and there's so much context to that time of the Apollo program that I think for me growing up felt very separate from it. And it might be very different for people that grew up during that time, but there was a lot going on during the 1960s, and all of that is the backdrop to the Apollo program now that I've begun to learn this context, I think makes the fact that we sent people to the moon so much more amazing in the context of all those struggles.

Joanne Higgins: Yes. I mean, I feel the same way. It was just remarkable. And when I was thinking about it as I was trying to pull it all together, the race to space was also about race. So I just was like, this is remarkable. And you don't learn it in that context when you learn it in school. I think it's a pretty profound piece of it. So I wanted to honor that.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: There's a moment where you get very emotional at the end of episode three, and you start talking about how grateful you are to hear these stories from people because they went through so much. And while racism has touched your life and my life and so many others, we stand here because of the things that came before us. I love what you said during that moment and the fact that you were so candid about your emotions about it, because it's a hard thing to grapple with and also something to be so grateful for that our ancestors and the people that have come before us have gone through these struggles and tried to make it better for everyone that came after.

Joanne Higgins: Yes. I was in that moment, it was, I think the weekend before Father's Day. That's what I was really in touch with because I was able to enter these people's homes and experience their families and recognize they were men who had children. And I just was so honored. I felt their legacy. I felt part of them. So it just moved me.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But we're now in this very interesting moment. We see in the context of this podcast that government action to open up doors for more people to be within the space community is clearly effective. That move by JFK completely changed the game for people. But now we're in a moment where a lot of that is being retracted, where DEI programs are being carved out of NASA. Do you feel like there's been enough inroads within the space community that we can do without these programs or do you think there will be a huge loss to the community by removing these programs from people?

Joanne Higgins: Well, based on the feedback that I've been getting from young engineers of color, my understanding is there's a lot more work to do. And since our industry is becoming more privatized now, there's even more work to do because privately people can hire who they want. I mean, you said it yourself, this became open to everybody because it was mandated. When you take away that, you don't get, I think, as vibrant an amount of people, at least in this moment.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, I'm hoping that the space community persists. I've seen the welcoming open arms of so many of the people in the space community. People don't get into space exploration because they generally don't see people as equals. They see this overview effect and all the ways that we're connected to one another, and that does give me hope. But I feel like the moment that will really crystallize it for me is when we see the Artemis astronauts on the moon. I want to see the first woman and the first person of color and the first non-American bouncing around up there in the lunar regolith. That will be the moment that it truly feels like it's real for me.

Joanne Higgins: I agree. I'm just so excited about Artemis. Yes, and I think they keep pushing it back.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, rockets are hard to build as the people in this podcast found out. There are some issues and we've got to make sure everyone's safe.

Joanne Higgins: That's very true. But they did it.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, they did.

Joanne Higgins: They did it. So yes, I'm looking forward to them supercharging it and making it safe and getting back to the moon, because I just think it's remarkable that even all this research I've done on it, I still have moments where I'm like, yeah, we went to the moon. It's a big deal. When I look up at it every night, I think that's a big deal.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And that effort is going to be made easier and better with every person's contribution we put into it. So opening up the space community, making sure that so many different people are represented does nothing but help us ultimately, and that's what makes it possible. We need all these voices.

Joanne Higgins: Yes. Oh, and I am also very excited about all the countries that have their own space program. Oh, my goodness. I've been reading about them and I'm just like, way to go, because we're not the only ones.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And it's just expanding from there. And all of these nations joining onto the Artemis Accords, whether or not they have their own space programs, we all through, international collaboration, are bolstering each other and building up new industries and bolstering the space community. And that's why it makes me so hopeful even in moments where things can be really challenging. I see how much progress we've made, and all I can think is that if we extend this out into the future, ultimately we will achieve those goals. Now that you've done this podcast series, how can we as a space community make sure that the contributions of these men during the Apollo program and the contributions of everyone in the space community going forward are honored and not forgotten?

Joanne Higgins: By doing exactly what we're doing right now. Reaching out, talking about it, spreading it out like roots on a tree, because I think our conversation, at least the conversations I've been having, they empower other people and it keeps it alive. It's the oldest way of transferring history in the world, telling stories like they did around the fires. That's how they related the stuff to the next generation and we're doing it with podcasts. It's like the cool fire.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: True. But really though everyone out there listening, if you were part of the Apollo program or if you have some space story, please document it somewhere, share it with the world, because we need to be able to hear these stories. They're so important. And I want to thank you personally for putting together this podcast. I learned so much, and I'm sure that other people will learn so much as well as they listen to it. So thank you for coming on to our show and sharing a bit more about it with our audience.

Joanne Higgins: Well, thank you for having me. And I keep learning. Every time I do an interview or talk to somebody, it ignites me. So I just keep being open and I really love that. Thank you, space.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Really though, I feel like the moment I stop learning, I'll start dying. So I'm just going to keep learning until I'm stardust.

Joanne Higgins: Oh, I like that.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, thanks for joining us, Joanne. I really appreciate it, and good luck on all of your future podcasting endeavors.

Joanne Higgins: Thank you very, very much.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: All four episodes of LA Made: The Other Moonshot are available now, and I highly encourage you to give them a listen. It's a powerful and eye-opening series. You'll find a link to the podcast on this episode's page at planetary.org/radio. We'll be right back after this short break.

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Sarah Al-Ahmed: Now, let's hear from Casey Dreier, our chief of space policy. I recorded this segment with him during The Planetary Society's Day of Action training in Washington DC where we gathered with over 100 advocates from across the country. Together, we're preparing to speak with legislators on Capitol Hill about the importance of NASA science and the scientists and engineers who make it happen. Hey, Casey, we are here at the Day of Action training right before the Day of Action. It's really wonderful to be here in person.

Casey Dreier: It is. It's great to actually be looking at you when we talk, Sarah. My voice is still holding out though, I don't know how much longer at this point.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And even worse tomorrow after all those days talking to legislators. But this week, we spoke with someone who did a podcast about the experiences of Black engineers during the Apollo program and about that executive order that JFK signed that allowed them to enter the workforce and what that did for people's ability to feel like they were included in the story of space. So to contextualize that, I wanted to talk with you a little bit about what's going on now with NASA and the DEI programs and what you see as the fallout of the rollback of some of these programs.

Casey Dreier: So we've seen an executive order removing such programs and support for those programs. And I think in the context of what you were just talking about, it's a reminder that particularly with NASA, something that's so forward-looking and optimistic that it's a really smart thing to do to pursue the maximal opportunity to bring as many talented people into this pipeline as we can. And we did that in the past and we can leverage it, our incredible things that we do in space to do that again. And that it also, I think the lesson was it doesn't just happen. It takes a policy effort and then also effort to implement it. Robert Kennedy had to go and yell at NASA leadership to actually aggressively pursue efforts to integrate, particularly in its southern centers. So it took lots of work to do that.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And we talked a little bit too about Ed Dwight's experience being put out there as potentially the first Black astronaut. And then, as soon as JFK was assassinated, the political will for that disappeared, and he didn't actually get to go to space until just last year. So we've seen what happens when political tides change and things can change very rapidly with these programs.

Casey Dreier: They can. And also a good reminder too about when you increase the opportunities to go to space as well, that you have more options. And I think that's one of the more maybe immediately optimistic things that we have is that there's a lot more options to go into space now as well.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And we've seen that a lot with commercial space in particular. We're coming up on the first all-woman mission in commercial space. We saw that with Haley Arceneuax, the first pediatric cancer survivor to go to space. And Emily Calandrelli, who was the 100th woman to go to space. It's been wild to see these things happen recently. So despite the fact that there are some opportunities that are being rolled back, there are other ways that people are seeing opportunities open up, which does give me a little bit of hope.

Casey Dreier: At the end of the day, it's whether the opportunities are still available and hopefully maybe the best case, what we're looking at here is that if they're not talked about, that doesn't mean the options still aren't there. And we're still looking at hopefully the first woman on the moon here relatively soon, even though they did just roll that language back as well at NASA. But one would hope, and I retain this hope, and I believe it's true that there are still be opportunities for women to be the first women on the moon relatively soon. And frankly, I expect that to be the case.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: What are we seeing with NASA's websites and other resources online?

Casey Dreier: Well, they've changed a lot due to those executive orders. A lot of data sets are starting to come back at least. But it's a fundamental to shift in their focus and attention. Though I do believe inclusion was restored as one of NASA's core identities shared with The Planetary Society. It's one of our core values as an organization.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Are there any other big things that have happened in the recent week in space policy that we should discuss right now?

Casey Dreier: Well, besides the Day of Action coming up, the Senate released its own version of what's called a NASA authorization bill. This is setting policy. We also saw that there is a permanent now or full year what's called continuing resolution. So usually in the past, it's the appropriators, the one who spend the money through appropriations that set NASA policy because authorizations don't happen as frequently as they used to. We are now in an interesting inversion moment of that where this year appropriators basically whiffed for the entire year, they said, "We will just continuing funding at 24 levels for the entire year now." And that's basically the appropriator saying, "We don't have any opinions to some degree on what happens in 2025." So if this authorization comes through, that sets literal policy. This is what NASA, you shalt do this, NASA. If that passes also a version in the House and they're able to pass it into law, then Congress actually will have a pathway to assert their priorities in this current fiscal year. Will that happen? We don't know, but this is the first step to that. And interestingly, this authorization bill is, we've been talking about a lot of dramatic change potentially for NASA, a lot of changes in workforce, a lot of changes in program, maybe these big cuts potentially. This authorization is a throwback all the way to the heady days of 2024, where it was much more of a steady as she goes approach.

And it includes, as it did last year when it came out as a draft, a reaffirmation of the SLS, which shows you how you know this is not a big change bill and Mars sample-return and other balanced approach to NASA space science. It's a much more familiar bill and familiar approach. And I should note, this is coming from Republican leadership in the Senate. So this suggests that of the discussions of change that are out there for NASA, there are still not political consent and full political endorsement of that and a lot can still happen.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, a lot I'm sure is going to happen within the next week and in the coming months. But we're all about to go together to the Capitol. We're taking over 100 people with us, and I'm excited to share our live show in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center next week with everyone. That's going to be a lot of fun.

Casey Dreier: Indeed with you and I on stage together for the first time in a one of the more complex live events I think that we've ever done as an organization. So we'll see if we're still standing, Sarah, next week when we talk.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We got this, Casey.

Casey Dreier: I'm very confident. We'll do great.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, thank you, and we'll hear again from the space policy team next week.

Casey Dreier: Thanks, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Now, it's time for What's Up with Dr. Bruce Betts, our chief scientist. This week we're taking a look at some of the legacy technologies from the Apollo era, innovations that are born out of the historic program that are still shaping the way we explore space today. Hey, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: Hello, Sarah. How are you doing?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Doing all right. Lots going on with our upcoming Day of Action. By the time people have heard this, it will have already occurred, but as you can imagine, there's all kinds of fun things going on with our team as we're preparing to go to Washington DC.

Bruce Betts: Oh, I bet.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And we did talk this week specifically about people who worked on the Apollo program that lived in the LA area, and spoke a bit about just the history of all of the aerospace stuff that's gone down in this area. I don't think people really recognize that Los Angeles is really a space city almost just as much as it is a Hollywood movie city.

Bruce Betts: It's true. And sometimes they get together and it's, well, it's rarely a good movie or a good technical thing, but they're both good on their own.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And also kind of how The Planetary Society got its wheels spinning early on, that combination of Carl Sagan's ability to just share science with people and the star power he had and all of the connections he had here in Hollywood, I think that really helped.

Bruce Betts: Definitely. Obviously, with Cosmos coming out around the time the Society started and all of the times Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show interviewed him, and that in an era where, of course, there are only a tiny number of stations and Johnny Carson ruled the late night airwaves.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I didn't fully contextualize what that entire period of history was until I was at the Nixon Presidential Library. There was this moment I went into the segment on the Apollo era, and there was so much going on there. There's the sections on civil rights, and there's the sections on the moon landing, and there's the sections on women and the way that their role in society was changing at the time and just seeing it all in one place together just really crystallized how wild the Apollo program was in the context of all of that. And in the hustle and bustle and all the stuff that came out of that program to this day, we're actually still using a lot of technologies that are derived from the Apollo program and going to the moon. So I wanted to talk a little bit about those feats of engineering and all the things that we are still using today in some kind of iteration.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, there's all sorts of things that not surprisingly continue on, and it makes lives easier for those who don't have to reinvent the wheel or, say, the heat shield basic design, which was worked out and has been used on this planet and other planets, including Orion, but also pretty much all of them use a similar technique because it's the one to use. They had engines on the space shuttle that were related. They had engines on the SLS that are tied to this, that just goes on and on. And basically, and they also did a lot of science that revolutionized both in pre-lunar landing and with humans and after that revolutionized our understanding of the moon and have led to things continue to be used from maps to science results with the current explorations of the moon.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It's going to be really cool to see people finally go back to the moon. I know it's going to be a lot of effort to spin up this Artemis program, and we've seen the delays in things like SLS, even though they're based on old technologies, it's still a colossal effort to go to the moon and thinking about the fact that these people did most of these calculations by hand with crews of people, with chalkboards and paper. I know I'm sounding like a ridiculous young person that couldn't live without their internet, but it's true. I am absolutely shocked by the feats of engineering these people accomplished.

Bruce Betts: No, it was amazing. I mean, to do it now as we see with missions that are trying and failing is still a real challenge. Space is hard to work in. It's even harder if you start trying to land somewhere. It's even harder if you try to keep humans alive at the same time. And so, the fact that they did all that with computer systems that right now your watch much less, your phone has more computing power than the spacecraft had as a whole, and the fact that they could do all that, and as you say, use teams of people for the calculations, the fact they basically got it all right, obviously with some serious exceptions with safety that went wrong, but unbelievably at that pace, things went really right. No one died in space or on these crazy missions with these crazy new systems that they developed. And then, now that set up a whole set of space heritage that's continued to the present.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And one of the people that our guest was interviewing for this podcast did win a Silver Snoopy, like that entire trajectory from experiencing what it was like to lose all those people during the Apollo 1 test to seeing these people go on and then accomplish these things and really take that into account and try so hard to keep our space travelers safe. It's created decades of space safety. I'm so impressed with what we've done with space travel, and it's only going to get cooler as we work together, hopefully. So I'm looking forward to the next generation of Artemis missions, but until we get there, what's our random space fact of the week?

Speaker 5: Random space fact.

Bruce Betts: Oh, this is good. So I thought to myself, how did Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo get their names? And you get different answers out there on the internet for Gemini, but for Mercury and Apollo, they were both from Abe Silverstein or Silverstein who was the head of NASA's space flight program. So he managed all the mission planning, spacecraft design, and such. And in that role, he named both Mercury and Apollo. Some places say that he named Gemini, but I think that actually went to Alex P. Nagy of NASA headquarters, who also was involved with the programs and suggested Gemini with the twin stars, Castor and Pollux, representing the two people in the spacecraft since it was a two-person spacecraft. Mercury was swift and fast, and Apollo had all sorts of different things tied to its meaning. And then, now Artemis was Apollo's twin and gives us a whole another perspective. But Planetary Society has helped name a lot of spacecraft, but not that far back when we didn't exist. So there you go.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's so cool. I would expect it would be two different people that would name those considering the jump in mythology. But as I experienced recently trying to go through a naming contest, there are a lot of names that we've used, but whole groupings of mythological figures that we haven't named in space yet. So we'll see what we end up naming things in the future. But I did, during a Yuri's Night a few years ago, I ran into this family with two little kids, and one was a young man who was wearing an Apollo jacket covered in all of the Apollo patches, and his little sister had an exactly matching jacket with no patches on it at all. And I asked the family about it and they said, "We are saving this jacket so that one day we can add all of the Artemis patches to it, and then the brother and sister can have matching jackets." And I just thought that was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever heard.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, it is really a neat idea. I like it. That's cool.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, I guess I'll see you next week after my wild adventure in DC. And for all those who already went to DC with us and listened to this show and we're at our live show, thanks for being there and we'll see you again next week.

Bruce Betts: All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about Sarah and her wild adventures in life. Thank you and goodnight.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week with our Planetary Radio live from DC: The Future of Space Politics. If you love the show, you can get planetary radio T-shirts at planetary.org/shop, along with lots of other cool spacey merchandise. Help others discover the passion, beauty and joy of space science and exploration by leaving a review and a rating on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your feedback not only brightens our day, but helps other curious minds find their place in space through Planetary Radio. You can also send us your space thoughts, questions, and poetry at our email at [email protected]. Or if you're a Planetary Society member, leave a comment in the Planetary Radio space in our member community app.

Planetary Radio is produced by The Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by our dedicated members. You can join us and help build a more inclusive and inspiring future for space exploration at planetary.org/join. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Pieter Schlosser. And until next week, ad astra.