Book Club Edition: Planetary Society Chief Scientist Bruce Betts’ latest for kids
Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science
The Planetary Society
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Are we alone? And just how big is space? Planetary Society chief scientist Bruce Betz joins us with the answers on this month's Planetary Radio Book Club edition. |
| 0:20.4 | Hello again, Planetary Radio listeners and lovers of books about our solar system and beyond. |
| 0:27.2 | I'm Matt Kaplan, Senior Communications Advisor for the Planetary Society, the former host of Planetary Radio. |
| 0:34.7 | Bruce Betts has completed his series of space books for young people. |
| 0:39.7 | The size of space collects many of Bruce's successful and very entertaining attempts |
| 0:45.7 | to reduce the vastness of the cosmos to human scale. |
| 0:50.0 | The other book, Are We Alone, borrows that greatest of questions that drives so much of science |
| 0:56.5 | and is at the core of the Planetary Society's mission. |
| 1:00.6 | Bruce is still the only human being who has been heard on every episode of the weekly |
| 1:06.0 | planetary radio series, with me for the first 20 years and now with host Sarah Al-Hmed. |
| 1:12.5 | But he has done so very much more for us across his many years at the society, |
| 1:17.6 | including his brilliant management of the Light Sail Solar Sail Project. |
| 1:22.7 | He's a planetary scientist whose PhD studies at Caltech were overseen by our co-founder, Dr. Bruce Murray. |
| 1:30.3 | Bruce Betts spent three years at NASA HQ and has crossed the globe in his work for us and others, |
| 1:37.1 | including the Planetary Science Institute, where he is an alumnus senior scientist. |
| 1:43.1 | You're about to hear much more about my good friend |
| 1:45.9 | in this recording of the live-streamed conversation we had |
| 1:49.9 | in the society's member community as 2026 gone underway. |
| 1:59.6 | We are here to talk about Bruce's latest books. |
| 2:03.8 | You see a shelf full of them behind him there. |
| 2:07.4 | Here are the two latest, and as I understand it, last books in the series. |
| 2:13.3 | Am I correct? |
... |
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