Skype a Scientist Interview

Skype a Scientist is an organization that crossed my radar because they extended their services to families with children quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic. I figured I could maybe be of service to the great community and signed up to be a scientist available to classrooms or families.

I got a “classroom” sign up that turned out to be one eighth grader who wanted to talk very specific numbers on mostly Apollo 11. I grabbed up a PDF link for Apollo by the Numbers and answered his questions and I get the distinct impression I will never hear from him again.

Bonus, though, I got asked to participate in a Q&A session about my space knowledge. Sarah’s moderation/interviewing made it really fun. I hope I get to do it again sometime.

Caveats: there’s several places where I say things that, with hindsight, I realize aren’t correct.

• All of two astronauts had come from Houston. I really did remember there being some kind of local pipeline into the astronaut corps but no, it’s fairer than that.

• The number of galaxies in the universe is estimated at 2 trillion, not 10^30. So I was only very, very, very wrong there.

• Probably other stuff I hadn’t realized but eh hell with it it was fun :D