Houston, Podcast by MediaEnav

Houston cover. Photography: Davide Coro Borja/Media Enav

It all starts with delay. A delay of a few seconds in the schedule. Tension that does not rise. Pressure that does not change. Temperature does not drop. A little telemetry that was meant to become One Instead, there he was, on the screen, before the increasingly horrified eyes of dozens of engineers and scientists, still nailed to that damn thing. zero. Engineers and scientists like you, who play meaning the last ten or fifteen years of work on this part. You still don’t know why, maybe you’ll find out in a few months, maybe never. You just know that there, a few meters away, outside the control room, the press and television are waiting for you. The last thing you want to do in the world is to open that door, with the circle of lights and microphones closing in around you, to announce: We have a problem. A problem hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth.

It’s situations like this that he’s talking about Houstonpodcast by Enaf media Designed and created by Valentina Guglielmo. A podcast about the difficult moments, crises and failures facing space missions, especially those related to scientific research. If it is normal for a newspaper to report on things that did not go as they would have liked, then for us Enaf – a research body dedicated to astrophysics – the matter is a bit more complicated: many already question the benefit in our research, if we also highlight The ones that ended badly…an understandable fear. However, this is how science works. It does not string together success after success, on the contrary: it is an exhausting series of unexpected events to be faced, problems to solve – often improvised – and disappointments to overcome. Space exploration is that to the nth degree. The final frontier into the unknown, chosen not because it is easy but because it is difficult, takes technology to the frontier and beyond: error and disruption are inevitably around the corner. So, this is the way we want to say it – with all its doubts, difficulties, defeats and emotions. And this is how he tells it Houston.

Valentina Guglielmo. Credits: Enaf Media

“I had never approached the world of space exploration from an engineering point of view. I had never seen a control room, nor had I ever dared to use a telescope for scientific purposes. Houston “It opened a world for me,” says Valentina Guglielmo, the magazine’s editor-in-chief Enaf media And already the author of another podcast, As if there was no tomorrow. “Guiding me, step by step, first through the pages of his books and then through the corridors and offices of the control center in Darmstadt, was Paolo Ferri, without whom this podcast would not have been possible. I hope that those who listen will be impressed by these stories as they impressed me, because of the complexity of the challenges they tell and the humanity of the reactions they color. Space exploration is elegance, harmony, complexity and the unexpected: thanks to David Coro Borja for being able to put it all inside the Houston logo.”

from now on Houston You can listen to it Apple PodcastWe are Spotify Come here Youtubeas well as on the new Kind of Enaf media Designed for podcasts. To tempt you to follow and subscribe, we’re not limited to an appetizer, we’re immediately offering you a collection of five episodes: Beagle 2, Schiaparelli, NASA’s Martian failures of the late 1990s, Rosetta and Philae. Then, starting in July, a new episode every month. Listen to them, share them, tell us what you think.

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