Host | Matthew S Williams

For more podcast Stories from Space with Matthew S Williams, visit: https://itspmagazine.com/stories-from-space-podcast

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Episode Notes

From Apollo to Artemis: What Lowell Observatory Knows About Going Back to the Moon

Fifty years is a long time to forget how to do something. That is, more or less, where NASA stood when Artemis 1 left the pad — and where it stands now, with Artemis 2 having put humans beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in half a century. The institutional memory had thinned. The people who built Apollo had moved on, retired, or passed away. The books, as Dr. Alex Polanski puts it in this episode, had to be dusted off.

Polanski, a Percival Lowell postdoctoral fellow at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, joins host Matt to talk about what Artemis 2 actually proved, and why Lowell — an observatory better known for its exoplanet work and its founder's obsession with Mars — has always sat closer to crewed spaceflight than most people realize. The nine Apollo astronauts trained on the volcanic terrain of northern Arizona. They studied lunar maps made at Lowell. They walked the same ground tourists walk today, in the shadow of the Clark refractor.

The conversation moves from the geology of the Moon's Highlands and Maria to the meteorite work of Dr. Nick Moskowitz, the mapping happening at the USGS office down the road, and the longer question behind all of it: is the Moon a stepping stone to Mars, or a detour? Polanski makes the case for the stepping stone — not out of caution, but because there are things we don't yet know we need to know, and a one-second light delay is a much more forgiving classroom than a twenty-minute one.

And then there's what comes next. Radio telescopes in the craters of the far side, shielded from Earth's noise. Optical interferometers spread across lunar real estate, free of the atmospheric wobble that makes ground-based astronomy feel, in Polanski's words, like reading a note card at the bottom of a pool. For the first time, the possibility of actually seeing the surfaces of other stars.

Percival Lowell saw canals on Mars that weren't there. He may have been looking at the veins in his own eye. A century later, his observatory is helping figure out how to look at the real thing.

🎙️ Guest: Dr. Alex Polanski, Lowell Observatory 🌐 lowell.edu

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Resources

Dr. Alex Polanski's Twitter
https://x.com/AlexNeedsSpace

Dr. Alex Polanski's company
https://x.com/LowellObs

Dr. Alex Polanski's LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-polanski-9ba397113/

Dr. Alex Polanski's Facebook profile
https://www.facebook.com/alex.polanski.3

Moon to Mars / NASA's Artemis Program
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis/

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For more podcast Stories from Space with Matthew S Williams, visit: https://itspmagazine.com/stories-from-space-podcast

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Host | Matthew S Williams

For more podcast Stories from Space with Matthew S Williams, visit: https://itspmagazine.com/stories-from-space-podcast

______________________

SpaceX founder Elon Musk recently announced that his company, founded on the idea of creating the first city on Mars, was focusing on the Moon instead. This announcement has left many wondering why he has made such a massive pivot. There are also questions as to why he's chosen to do this now.

SpaceX, Mars, Moon, NASA, Musk, Bezos, Blue Origin, Artemis, xAI, Starlink, Starship, HLS, astronauts, space, Blue Moon, New Glenn, lunar lander, lunar surface, Moon base

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Resources

Fraser Cain - Soundbites
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqCx81ky8Ts

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For more podcast Stories from Space with Matthew S Williams, visit: https://itspmagazine.com/stories-from-space-podcast

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Host | Matthew S Williams

For more podcast Stories from Space with Matthew S Williams, visit: https://itspmagazine.com/stories-from-space-podcast

______________________

Episode Notes

Asteroid Mining: The Promise, the Problems, and the Philosophy

Asteroid mining is one of those ideas that cycles in and out of public fascination — generating enormous excitement, then fading when people realize it won't happen within the next news cycle. But the concept never truly disappears, and for good reason.

Near-Earth asteroids, numbering in the millions, contain staggering quantities of precious metals, rare earth elements, and water ice. Ironically, those same materials — iron, gold, platinum, nickel, and dozens of others — were originally delivered to Earth by asteroids during the Late Heavy Bombardment period some four billion years ago. We're essentially talking about going back to the source.

The three main asteroid types — carbonaceous (C-type), silicate (S-type), and metallic (M-type) — each offer distinct resources. Beyond metals, the abundance of water ice in the solar system could relieve pressure on Earth's increasingly stressed freshwater supply and fuel deep-space missions.

Philosophically, the implications are profound. Thomas More and Nietzsche both wrestled with why scarcity drives human value systems. Flood the market with space-borne metals and the entire economic architecture built on scarcity begins to crumble. Orwell saw it too — abundance erodes hierarchy. The first trillionaires born from asteroid mining might find their wealth meaningless almost immediately after making it.

But the darker scenarios deserve equal attention. Redistributing consumption off-world doesn't eliminate it. Space debris, environmental degradation beyond Earth, and the very real risk of exploitative labor structures in off-world operations — echoes of colonialism and indentured servitude — are not science fiction. They're logical extensions of human patterns.

The enthusiasm may ebb and flow, but asteroid mining remains an inevitable chapter in humanity's story. The real question is what kind of story we choose to write around it.

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Resources

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For more podcast Stories from Space with Matthew S Williams, visit: https://itspmagazine.com/stories-from-space-podcast

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.