Dr Nicola Fox, head of science at Nasa

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr Nicky Fox is only the second woman to hold the post of Head of Science at NASA since the agency was founded in 1958. She has responsibility for around a hundred missions which are investigating the mysteries of outer space. These missions are tackling questions such as how do hurricanes form and are we alone in the universe.

Nicky was born in Hitchin in Hertfordshire and her father introduced her to the wonders of space when she was just a few months old. In 1969 he lifted her out of her cot to watch the television coverage of the Apollo 11 mission when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Nicky’s enduring fascination with the cosmos led her to study physics at Imperial College in London.

After completing her PhD she took up a post-doctoral fellowship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland. In 2010 she became the project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe, humanity’s first mission to a star, which launched in 2018 and is still flying through the sun’s atmosphere collecting data. Recently she oversaw the Osiris-Rex mission which brought back the first asteroid samples from deep space.

In 2021 Nicky was awarded the American Astronautical Society’s Carl Sagan Memorial Award for her leadership in the field of Heliophysics.

DISC ONE: The Best – Tina Turner DISC TWO: Livin’ On A Prayer - Bon Jovi DISC THREE: Lara’s Theme - MGM Studio Orchestra, composed and conducted by Maurice Jarre DISC FOUR: Danny Boy - Andy Williams DISC FIVE: When You Know - Shawn Colvin DISC SIX: (Reach Up for the) Sunrise - Duran Duran DISC SEVEN: Boulevard of Broken Dreams - Green Day DISC EIGHT: Canyon Moon - Harry Styles

BOOK CHOICE: Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan LUXURY ITEM: Lego CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Boulevard of Broken Dreams - Green Day

Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Paula McGinley

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
0:03.8	podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.
0:08.6	It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.
0:15.3	What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism
0:19.8	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
0:23.7	And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject
0:28.4	you might not even have thought you were interested in.
0:30.2	Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,
0:36.1	you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.
0:39.7	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:44.5	Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Disks podcast.
0:48.5	Every week I ask my guest to choose the 8 tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
0:56.0	And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
1:01.0	I hope you enjoy listening. My castaway this week is the physicist Dr Nicola Fox, the head of science at NASA.
1:30.0	She's leading the space agency in a new ambitious era of exploration and describes her job as the best in the world and beyond it.
1:38.5	At present she's overseeing around a hundred missions, managing an $8 billion budget and tackling questions like,
1:45.2	how do hurricanes form? What can we learn from asteroids? And are we alone in the universe?
1:51.1	Her own story starts with that same spirit of curiosity. It began in Hitchin in Hertfordshire,
1:57.0	where her dad, himself captivated by the Apollo missions, sparked a childhood fascination with space. She was just eight months old when he lifted her from her cot so she could
2:06.8	watch Neil Armstrong take humankind's first steps on the moon. Today she has a new generation of spacecraft to look after. She says
2:15.8	watching them launch is like sending your kids off to college. You know they're
2:20.0	going to go and do great things, but it's a big sea change in your life and you hope your kids will call home.
	...

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