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AirSpace

National Air and Space Museum

We see the connections to aviation and space in literally everything. From our favorite movies and the songs in our playlists to the latest news of space exploration and your commercial flight home for the holidays – aerospace is literally everywhere you look. Twice a month our hosts riff on some of the coolest stories of aviation and space history, news, and culture. We promise, whether you’re an AVGeek, wannabe Space Camper, or none of the above, you’ll find not only a connection to your life but you’ll learn something interesting in the process.

We see the connections to aviation and space in literally everything. From our favorite movies and the songs in our playlists to the latest news of space exploration and your commercial flight home for the holidays – aerospace is literally everywhere you look. Twice a month our hosts riff on some of the coolest stories of aviation and space history, news, and culture. We promise, whether you’re an AVGeek, wannabe Space Camper, or none of the above, you’ll find not only a connection to your life but you’ll learn something interesting in the process.

VOYAGES TO MARS: Sending Humans

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November 17, 202016min 38sec

We’re back with the fourth installment of our literary mixtape, Voyages to Mars! The Perseverance Rover is on its way to the Red Planet and space agencies around the world hope that someday in the not too distant future, humans will join it. Mars is a popular destination for humans in sci-fi literature. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, published a few years before the world’s first satellite was even launched (!), remains one of the most influential stories of human settlement on Mars ever published. In two selections from the Chronicles  – “The Settlers” and “The Green Morning” – Bradbury considers what the motivation for settling Mars might be, what those first human settlers might be like, and how they might transform Mars into something more in line with life as we know it on Earth.

About Voyages to Mars: On July 30, 2020 NASA’s Perseverance Rover launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida to Jezero Crater, Mars. To accompany Percy on seven-month journey, we’re compiling a literary mixtape of Martian-themed sci-fi set to music by DJ Kid Koala. Voyages to Mars is made possible by the support of the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian Orlando Regional Council.

THE SETTLERS and THE GREEN MORNING from THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES © 1950, renewed 1977 by Ray Bradbury; Broadcast by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. on behalf of Ray Bradbury Literary Works LLC.