Europe’s place in outer space
The Europeans | European news, politics and culture
Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer
4.8 • 162 Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2023
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The last time we interviewed the physicist Meganne Christian, she was working on the French-Italian research base on Antarctica. Now she has her eye on outer space. We ring her up to find out more about her new life as a reserve astronaut for the European Space Agency, and Europe's role in the new commercial space era. We're also talking about Pedro Sánchez's Spanish election gamble and a hopeful court verdict for same-sex Romanian couples.
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT HERE: https://europeanspodcast.com/episodes/europes-place-in-outer-space
Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast and would like to help us keep making it, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month at patreon.com/europeanspodcast (many currencies are available). You can also help new listeners find the show by leaving us a review or giving us five stars on Spotify.
You can follow Meganne here on Twitter and Instagram, and the ESA here and here. The report on Europe's future role in space exploration can be found here, and you can find out more about the ESA astronaut selection process here. Some other links you might want to check out:
- ESA Space Ambition book
- ESA Terrae Novae 2030+ Strategy Roadmap
- International Space Station Benefits for Humanity 2022
- ESA Human Spaceflight on Twitter
This week's Isolation Inspiration: 'The [Queer] Politics of Eurovision' from verilybitchie, and This Is Love: The Museum of Broken Relationships.
00:22 Welcome to the western-most peninsulas of Eurasia
03:28 Bad Week: Spain's Socialists
11:36 Good Week: LGBT couples in Romania
20:53 Interview: Meganne Christian on life as a reserve astronaut and what Europe is up to in space
32:53 Isolation Inspiration: The Queer Politics of Eurovision and The Museum of Broken Relationships
35:09 Happy Ending: Cheers to you, Gert-Jan
Producers: Katy Lee and Wojciech Oleksiak
Mixing and mastering: Wojciech Oleksiak
Music: Jim Barne and Mariska Martina
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the podcast that tries to help you understand what's going on in this collection of countries that make up the westernmost peninsulas of Eurasia. |
| 0:34.0 | Is that what we're going by these days? |
| 0:35.8 | Yes, that's what we're calling it. Okay. We do that by sharing the |
| 0:39.4 | weird, the wonderful, and occasionally the wearisome stories from this audible collection of |
| 0:45.7 | countries. I'm Dominic Kramer, speaking to you from a very sunny Amsterdam, and as ever, |
| 0:51.3 | that voice you heard earlier was from Katie Lee, who's in Paris. How are you, Katie? |
| 0:56.2 | I'm good. It's also very nice and sunny here. Although I do think the weather has gone to some |
| 1:01.1 | people's heads a bit. I was at my local swimming pool this week. And there was a fight, |
| 1:06.6 | like an actual punch-up. In the pool? Yeah. There was all of this like thrashing and splashing and swearing and things got so bad |
| 1:15.4 | that they actually had to cut off the music for the acrobics class. |
| 1:19.8 | Whoa, that's epic. |
| 1:22.1 | I wish someone had filmed it. |
| 1:23.1 | It sounds like it would have gone viral. |
| 1:24.5 | Maybe. |
| 1:25.2 | I'm pretty sure that it involved a crash because Parisian |
| 1:28.8 | swimming pools have this completely insane organisation system. I don't know what it's like over there |
| 1:33.6 | in the Netherlands, but in the UK there's like a slow lane and a medium lane and a fast lane. |
| 1:39.4 | But here in Paris, we organise things by the type of swimming, the stroke. So there's like a front |
| 1:45.1 | cruel lane and a backstroke lane. And that means that people of all speeds are in the same |
| 1:50.4 | lane and they're like constantly crashing into each other. It is chaos. Oh, that sounds really silly. |
| 1:55.9 | I mean, I love my city very much and my adopted country too, but this is just one thing that |
| 2:00.8 | doesn't make sense |
... |
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