Radiolab - Bigger Little Questions

We're back with Part 2! When we dumped out our bucket of questions, there was a lot of spillover. Like, A LOT of spillover. So today, we’re chasing down answers to some bigger, little questions. This episode was reported and produced by Annie McEwen, Bethel Habte, Latif Nasser, Matt Kielty, Simon Adler and Tracie Hunte. Special thanks to Stephen Brady and Staff Sergeant Erica Picariello in the US Air Force's 21st Space Wing. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Duration: 59m
Broadcast on: 22 Dec 2017
Audio Format: other

We're back with Part 2! When we dumped out our bucket of questions, there was a lot of spillover. Like, A LOT of spillover. So today, we’re chasing down answers to some bigger, little questions.

This episode was reported and produced by Annie McEwen, Bethel Habte, Latif Nasser, Matt Kielty, Simon Adler and Tracie Hunte.

Special thanks to Stephen Brady and Staff Sergeant Erica Picariello in the US Air Force's 21st Space Wing.

Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

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3D Lab is supported by AT&T. We all love to connect via video calls or texts. Right now at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with iPhone trade-in, any condition. It has the ultimate pro camera system and big leap in battery life so you can turn this deal into a long lasting connection. Learn how you can trade in your iPhone for the new iPhone 18 Pro requires trade-in of iPhone 14 or higher excluding iPhone 16E and eligible plan. In terms of restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. Ready? 3-2-1. This is Radio Lab and this is part two of our attempt to answer some listener questions that have piled up over the years, gathering digital dust in our inbox. And a few of them in this round come from kind of close to home. In any case, starting us off this round is a question-asker who has developed quite a reputation here at Radio Lab. Scott spoke to our producer Latif Nasser. Now Scott, he actually sent us a lot of questions that caught our attention. Why is the moon devoid of all color? Have we seriously not translated any animal languages yet? But then we zeroed in on one of Scott's questions that at first seemed kind of simple but it got really big. Okay. When a spatula goes into space, how do they make sure it doesn't hit any satellite? Is it just radar or is there some kind of complicated system that tracks all of them? And since we talked, it's just kind of looking up about this, you know, about like how many satellites are actually up there and what are we even calling space junk and has this affected anything yet? You know, it goes from like kind of informational to like almost like this sort of doom and gloom real fast, like there's so much junk up there, like it's going to be impossible to leave the Earth's atmosphere pretty soon. And I don't know, it just kind of, I'd be curious to see who's in charge of all this. That's what I want to know. Who's in charge here? Who's in charge of space? Okay. Is everybody there? Yeah, I'm here. I've got Colonel Walsh and she's willing to talk to you about space surveillance. Okay, great. Ma'am, can you still hear us? Yes, I'm here. So I couldn't actually find anyone who is literally in charge of space, but I did find what I think is pretty much the next best thing. Lieutenant Colonel Mia Walsh and I'm the commander of the 18th Space Control Squadron. I think your title has got to be the coolest title of anyone I've ever interviewed. My title is the coolest title, the commander of the 18th Space Control Squadron. Yeah, that's like, you should have like an action figure, I think. That would be amazing. It would be a very tiny action figure. Okay, so let's start from the top.

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