宇宙ステーションの科学研究と、マーガレット・ハミルトンの遺産

Science on the space station and Margaret Hamilton's legacy in spaceflight and beyond. You're listening to Are We There Yet, the radio show exploring space exploration. Hi, I'm Brendan Byrne. More science is on its way to the International Space Station, and a new crew just arrived to help support hundreds of science experiments. If you were able to take something and have an added dimension to it, a fourth dimension to it, would you not want to take advantage of that? Would you not want to see how things react differently? We'll speak with the International Space Station and National Laboratory's Patrick O'Neill about science aboard the ISS. Then, Margaret Hamilton, well known for being a software engineer lead during NASA's Apollo program, has died. She and others in her field basically invented the term software engineering. We'll speak with space historian Emily Carney about Hamilton's accomplishments and her legacy with NASA, MIT, and her contributions to the computer science community. That's ahead on Are We There Yet? Before we jump into this show, have you checked out our other show?

When We Find Them is a new limited podcast series from Central Florida Public Media, and it's out now. What happens to society when scientists do discover signs of life in the universe? When We Find Them takes a deep dive into that day and what might come after. New episodes are out Wednesdays. You can get it wherever you get this podcast. and join Central Florida Public Media for a special Space on Tap featuring a live taping of this show, Are We There Yet? And we're celebrating when we find them with an interactive first contact party at Hourglass Brewing in Longwood. All of that is on Thursday, October 15th. The event is free and open to the public, but RSVP is encouraged. Find more details at cfpublic.org slash space on tap. More science is en route to the International Space Station after SpaceX's supply launch from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday. And a brand new crew arrived recently to conduct those experiments.

The four-member of NASA's Crew 13 will help with hundreds of research projects and science experiments. From cancer studies and Parkinson's disease research to looking at how spaceflight affects the human body, the science during this crewed mission will help future NASA missions in space and provide medical research for us here on Earth. Here to talk more about the studies and research on the space station is Patrick O'Neill. He's the International Space Station and National Laboratories Public Affairs and Outreach Lead. Patrick, welcome back to Arbularia. Well, thank you very much for having me. Great to be here with you today. For folks here on the East Coast, we woke up to beautiful SpaceX jellyfish. But that has got to be a great sight to you because that means your science is being delivered to the International Space Station. Tell us a bit about what's on board and why this is so important. They're called Commercial Resupply Services Missions. And for us, they're effectively our Super Bowl. So we get about, you know, between five to seven, maybe eight of a year. And so on this mission, there's a lot of biomedical research that's going to be going to the orbiting laboratory. We, along with NASA's Biological and Physical Sciences Division,

helped to fund what we call the Igniting Innovation Challenge, which was focused specifically looking at cancer therapeutics to create more effective therapeutics for us here on this planet. There's two projects that are flying on this mission that are associated with that. One is from Cedars-Sinai. Another project is from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Those are ones that are focused specifically on kind of cancer remedies. But then we also have a project from the National Stem Cell Foundation, who has flown multiple projects over the years looking at neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. Also on this mission, we have a lot of sites funded by the National Science Foundation. One of the critical elements for us, I mentioned the projects just now. Those are a little bit further down the line. They're a little bit more applied in their R&D. But there's still a heavy influence on supporting fundamental research because that fundamental research on station will eventually lead to much more applied knowledge down the road. So the National Science Foundation is funding four different investigations that are flying on this mission. One of them is from the University of California at San Diego looking at how mud flows after wildfires.

And then the last project I will mention, also about trying to inspire the next generation of researchers and explorers. We have a project from the Genes in Space competition, which is an annual opportunity for students around the United States to propose genetic experiments on the space station using our mini PCR machines. So we have a student from the Pacific Northwest, and she is launching her project along with her teammates. And so we're excited to see what it is that they're able to learn and how that genetic process evolves in space and what the impacts might be for us to better understand living and working in space, as well as are there things that we could bring back down to us here on this planet. Patrick, this may sound like a silly question, but I want to ask it. What is the benefit of sending all of this science off of the planet and conducting it in space in the first place? Let's imagine that we live in a world of 3D. If you're able to take something and have an added dimension to it, a fourth dimension to it, Would you not want to take advantage of that? Would you not want to see how things react differently? Are you able to take knowledge from how that's reacting differently and incorporate that back into your 3D model?

To me, that's almost how you look at microgravity, where you have this this variable that is completely different than what it is that you have in a normal laboratory setting. And now you have access to it continuously. So what can you learn from that? How can how can insights from that environment be brought back down to your science here on the ground? So to me, that at a high level is why you'd want to do something off our planet for our planet. There was 6,500 pounds of supplies that launched on Tuesday morning. Not all of that is your science experiments, obviously. You need some food and stuff for the astronauts that are going to be conducting the experiments. But there is a limited amount of space to send science up there. There's a limited amount of time, limited amount of resources up there. How do experiments get selected? Let's say I wanted to fly something up there. I probably have a very slim chance of you picking my experiment. But what would I have to do? To your point, it's like a constant game of Tetris that we play alongside NASA, along with our international partners. So if I wanted to send, you know, let's call this this pen up right now that I have my hand for the listening audience.

It just can't go up by itself. It has to go up in flight certified hardware, first and foremost. There are a variety of companies that own and operate their own facilities on the International Space Station that have the ability to leverage allocation from NASA and the ISS National Laboratory. So first and foremost, if you wanted to send said pen up to the space station, you've got to be able to find hardware that allows for this to happen. Second of all, you have to have a scientific justification. You can't just fly something up to the space station for the sake of flying it. This is arguably the most expensive thing developed by humanity, and there is a high degree of stewardship that coincides with anything that goes to the orbiting laboratory. So there's got to be that scientific merit. And then last but not least what is that benefit by launching that to the space environment that we can have here on this planet The differentiating factor between what we do from an ISS National Lab perspective and what NASA does is our work is using the space environment to benefit life back here on Earth whereas the work that NASA does on the space station is focused more on better understanding the living conditions

and advancing technologies so that we can continue to live off our planet, but also go to places like the moon and Mars. So my branded pen here probably has a pretty slim chance of getting sent up to the ISS via the ISS National Lab. But that being said, there might be a justification for it. I mean, and that's where your science mind's got to kick in a little bit, too. And, again, we've sent some unique projects over the years to the space station under National Lab's sponsorship that maybe you would sit there and say, huh, I never would have thought that. And I'll give you a great example right now. We just had the World Cup that was in North America. Adidas launched multiple projects to the space station over the years. One of them was a spin dispersion study using their soccer ball. And insights from that spin dispersion study had been incorporated into the ball that was ultimately used during the World Cup. So, again, there's a lot of hardcore biomedical science that she talked about. But then sometimes there's some unique projects where you can still find a use case justification where it's going to make sense for us. But again, you just got to dig into what the science is and how we can leverage this space environment to really extrapolate that science.

You're listening to Our Way There Yet from Central Florida Public Media. I'm Brendan Byrne. We're speaking with Patrick O'Neill, the public affairs and outreach lead for the International Space Station National Laboratory. Patrick, along with sending supplies and soccer balls up to the International Space Station, we are also sending astronauts to conduct this work, right? A crew just came back. A crew launched as well. How do the astronauts play into all of this stuff that you've got going up there? They've got to actually do the experiments, right? We just had our 13th crew rotation since the commercial crew program has really taken off, quite literally. So it's fantastic for us because we have additional astronauts that are on the space station prior to the commercial crew program. By not having the level of access we now have with astronaut support, there was about half as much science that was being supported. So through this program in and of itself, you now have additional hands. You now have more astronauts that are in a position to do the work of what we do on the International Space Station. So to your point, every single day is dedicated towards supporting hours and hours worth of R&D,

just as every single day is dedicated towards them working out. We have the astronauts working out between two and three hours every single day just to make sure that they maintain that density and muscle so that when they do return back home, they're able to do so in a very nominal capacity. But the astronauts themselves will typically be on a rotation between six and nine months. So the Crew-12 astronauts who just returned back, they were on station for nearly eight months. During that time frame, they were supporting hundreds of research investigations across the board. And it's not just NASA investigations or ISS National Lab investigations, but it's also our international partners who also are part of that coalition of really pushing the boundaries of science and innovation. So when you had the Crew-13 launch that took place last week, there's a brief time frame where everyone is kind of coming together while the Crew-13 astronauts are, quote-unquote, getting their space legs about them. And then the Crew-12 astronauts returned back home. And so now the Crew-13 astronauts, along with those that also flew up on the Soyuz previously, are going to be supporting a variety of investigations over the next few months.

So we just had this CRS-35 mission, which hopefully we'll dock and rendezvous with the International Space Station later this week. And then later this year, we will have another resupply mission from our partners over at Northrop Grumman, who will be bringing a slew of research goodies to the International Space Station. So those that are up there are very, very busy. It's going to be a lot of to and fro as far as visiting vehicles over the next couple of months. And a lot of that's going to be dependent because of the great science that's going to be going with them. Patrick, you described the process of getting that science up there as like a game of Tetris, figuring out what's going to go when and how it's going to fit. do you bring consideration as to what astronaut is there? I'm thinking, you know, Jessica Watkins just launched on Crew 13. She's a geologist. Do you pick experiments that she may be better off performing, or are the astronauts expected to know what they're doing when they're up there? That's a great question. So there are some astronauts, to your point, that have specific skill sets. And so you mentioned Jessica. We have a Neil Mennoe who is on station right now.

He's also a medical doctor. So a party would say, well, that just means let's go and let's logjam all the biomedical research towards those types of astronauts with that skill set. The answer is no. They actually all kind of dabble in a lot of these different things. And I think that that's one of the great things about the space station, too, is that just because you might have one skill set down here on the ground up there, you're all in this together and we're all supporting science. And again, they're very active, they're very busy, but they're also very collaborative along the way. One of the things that you're also doing is reaching out to startups, to the private industry as well. What role do startups play in this kind of off-planet science that you have going on? So startups have represented more than 100 payloads that have flown to the space station under sponsorship of the International Space Station National Laboratory since 2012. For context, we have flown just over 1,000 payloads. So that roughly represents about 10%. But one of the reasons why we had this strong desire to leverage that startup community is that's the beauty of the ISS National Lab is to engage and enable access and opportunity from a variety of commercial partners, whether you're a Fortune 500 company or a startup with a unique and novel idea.

So over the years, the ISS National Lab has partnered with a variety of accelerator programs to drive that activity on station. But once they've come back after the research that they've done on station, they have been able to amass nearly $3 billion in private equity investments. So it demonstrates that they're learning a lot of great things. And on top of that, too, a lot of these companies continue to make space part of their research portfolio moving forward. So obviously, they're learning something and they see the true value in why they would want to do something in that space environment. And it's having benefits towards their R&D and their business portfolios. Finally, Patrick, all good things must come to an end, and the International Space Station will retire in the 2030s. How are you thinking about the future of these vitally important space-based experiments that we've been talking about? Where will they go next? It's bittersweet, but at the same time, I also look more at the legacy of what the space station has done for all of these years and driving as much activity as we have done, learning as much as we have done, being able to validate technologies,

understand business models, how they might be able to react in space. I think of this space station as a fantastic test kitchen that we have had for nearly 27 years. And to your point, it might be around 30 years by the time it has all said and done To the extent that we can let leverage this space environment take the knowledge gained and then hopefully segue that to some of these other commercial destinations in low Earth orbit where NASA could be one of many customers that has the opportunity to take advantage of a space environment. And who is to say that these future space platforms, they might embody a lot of the things that we already see on this space station, but maybe there might be a little bit more of an emphasis on areas where we see really ripe opportunities, like maybe there's more manufacturing capabilities, or maybe there will be other areas where we really delve into the biomedical research. So I think it's an exciting time. We've been speaking with Patrick O'Neill, Public Affairs and Outreach Lead for the International Space Station National Laboratory. Patrick, thanks so much for joining us. Brendan, thank you so much. So to come, a look at Margaret Hamilton's NASA legacy. You know, she led the team that was really responsible for the code for the Apollo command module and

the Apollo, the lunar module computers. A glimpse into Hamilton's career in computer science and space exploration. That's Ed on Are We There Yet? You're listening to Are We There Yet? from Central Florida Public Media. I'm Brendan Byrne. Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist who led MIT's Instrumentation Lab during NASA's Apollo program, died late last month. Hamilton was 90 years old. Her storied career includes working on NASA's Apollo 11 mission that put two astronauts on the moon for the very first time. In addition to her work on the Apollo program, she worked at MIT for over a decade, has over 130 publications, founded two software engineering companies, and has dozens of awards, including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom. Here to talk more about Hamilton's legacy is Emily Carney, a space historian and the co-author of Starbound, a beginner's guide to the American space program, from Goddard's rockets to Goldilocks planets and everything in between. Emily, welcome back to Are We There Yet?

Thanks for having me. I always love talking to you guys. So this is awesome. Always great to talk with you about history. And space history lost a very historical figure recently, Margaret Hamilton. Emily, tell me a bit about her. What was her impact on the American Space Program? Margaret Hamilton led the software engineering division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory during the 1960s. Many people know her from the there's a famous picture of her taken in 1969. She's standing. She's this young woman wearing, you know, this cute 60s dress. She's got long hair and glasses that she's standing by these huge stacks of paper that are like higher than she is. And that's kind of what people know her from. The photo is basically showing all the code that her team wrote for the Apollo lunar mission. So, yeah, she was a big part of the, you know, the Apollo lunar missions in the 60s. She and others in her field basically invented the term software engineering, which now, I mean, is a huge, you know, is a huge industry.

But they basically built that industry from the ground up. So she was a huge pioneer. And she did a lot more than just work on Apollo. She her career started in the 50s. You know, if you read about her on the MIT websites, she had her hands on a lot of projects. I think her biggest fame is from that photo and plus the fact that she led, you know, she led the team that was really responsible for the code for the Apollo command module and the Apollo, the lunar module computers. She really didn't gain a lot of recognition and she didn't get a lot of accolades really until the last decade before she passed. Most famously, she received the Presidential, I think, the Medal of Freedom. And also, she was immortalized in Lego. About 10 years ago, there was a Lego set. Mae Jemison was part of it. I think Sally Ride, Nancy Grace Roman. Yeah, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, very high bar there. Certainly being made as a Lego also just as high, right?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think my career peaked when I became a Lego. You're a Lego? Yes, I have a Lego. So it's very limited edition, but I have one. I need a Lego. Oh, that's so cool. Tell me a bit about the work that went into the Apollo program, which the more you look back on it, the more complex and intense it seems to be. And there are characters like Margaret Hamilton that are making it work, which is I can't believe it. It's hard to believe, you know. Yeah. Well, Apollo and Hamilton would be the first to say this. And pretty much anybody who was a big figure during Apollo would be the first to say this, including Neil Armstrong, who was obviously many of us know who he is. He's the first human to walk on the moon. But Apollo was a gigantic group effort in the 1960s and early 70s. It involved roughly half a million people, all manner of workers from people, you know, riveting people. So women, you know, with little paint pots doing making spacesuits, things like that.

And also people such as Margaret Hamilton, who were, you know, she and her team were basically building software from the ground up. And when I say software, you know, people in more recent, I guess, times you'd imagine, you know, you'd buy a CD or a disc. or nowadays you download stuff from a cloud, right? Well, back then, software was, a lot of that was hand, like, rope. It consisted of rope memory, and that's hard to explain, but basically it was kind of written into some of the cording going into the computers, which is insane to me. Like, yeah, because you didn't have, you know, a lot of, you know, storage back then. You didn't have flash drives. You could just put a flash drive in it and be like, yep, I got it, you know. But it was done by rote memory back in the day, but the process was a lot different. It was more difficult. Granted, there weren't as many line of codes as there probably is in modern spacecraft, but they wrote all the code by hand, which to me is crazy, and then they gave it to, like, a punch operator to basically write it, which to me is crazy.

That concept is just nuts to me. But it worked. You're listening to Army of the Area from Central Florida Public Media. I'm Brendan Byrne. We're speaking with Emily Carney, spaceflight historian and writer. She's the co-author of the book Starbound, a beginner's guide to the American space program from Goddard's rockets to Goldilocks planets and everything in between. Emily, you mentioned that Margaret was part of a Lego set. It was the women of early NASA was the theme of the set. Tell me a bit about her role and how common it would be to have a woman as a software engineer at this time. There weren't many women in that field at all. years and years and years ago I saw the the you know the photographs of her at MIT and there's a few other cool pictures of her at MIT there's one of her in um sort of a command module mock-up with a with the MIT flag with a pennant stuff like that and I was always intrigued because I like I had no idea women worked in that field back then you know that seems like you know she was and she indeed was one of the only ones and

for to be a team lead at that time as a woman is is like finding out the existence to me of like yeah there's unicorns you know something like that I mean it's really just not very heard of you know there were other women of that time there just weren't many of them which is why for better or for worse, they stick out because they're the only ones. In 2026, you wrote an article after the death of Margaret Hamilton was announced titled, For the Love of God, Read the Woman's Obituary. Tell me a bit about what propelled you to write this. When Margaret Hamilton, when it was announced she had died on September 30th, immediately, you know, I got home and I started writing an obituary because she's a, like I said, she's ubiquitous in Apollo. You know, a lot, most people in the space world know who she is because of the photo. I wanted to write an obit and I wanted to, you know, sort of make it, because the internet is what it is,

there's some myths and sort of people misspeaking about what she actually did. There were people who's like, she wrote all that code. And, you know, and this isn't a diss against her by any means. She led the team that wrote that code. She wrote some of the code in there. nobody could have done all that by themselves that's a lot of work so I was writing the obituary and we we posted it a few hours later these comments show up and I'll just read I'm gonna read a few of them I have them right in front of me she was one of the 400,000 people who made the moon landings possible her role was important Neil Armstrong's role was gigantic uh somebody said are you aware that obituaries are sometimes embellished and I'm like thinking you know I wrote the dang thing. I didn't. I researched it before I wrote it. I did give her credit for a contribution. It was an important one. It was no more important than the contributions of thousands of other people. Her being a female does not add significant gravitas to her important contribution. And then there was another comment. And this is what it said. She did not have anything to do with

the design of the Apollo 11 alarm handling code. That was done by Hal Lanning, who also wrote the compiler they used, but she often later got credit for that in the lunar module code because her new director husband also made her manager of the lunar module code after Apollo 11. Stuff like that. I've been writing obits about space figures for about almost two decades now, almost 20 years. Never in my life have I seen comments like that about, you know, somebody who's deceased. Because most obits an obituary should be basically like hey we're celebrating this person's life who who's gone now not well this person didn't do that much you know this person was just one person and I'm just going to offer this as like sort of a comparison and I'm kind of stealing from something that Lois Honeycutt who's a senior administrator in Space Hipsters said in the comments but what if I went online, lost my mind and said something like, well, you know, Neil Armstrong wasn't that

important. You know, he he only walked on the moon for two hours. He didn't drive a lunar rover and he didn't do much science on the on the moon. So he wasn't that big of a deal. People would lose their minds, you know, because he was a big deal. You know, even though he didn't do as much as later Apollo astronauts on the moon, he's the first one who land there. That means a lot. You know, it doesn't take away from what later people did on the moon, though. And I feel like there was a lot of people threatened by her accomplishments, almost, which to me is very, like, what she did doesn't take away from what others did. I just feel like you see a lot of that attitude nowadays directed to women, not always just from men. Other women do it, too, you know, where it's like, well, this person, they feel threatened that someone's getting positive attention, and they want to like take it away from them almost and um I don't understand it you know Margaret Hamilton she would have been the first to admit I wasn't the only person working on this you know she and

if you know she were still around yeah it was just very strange and at the end of the article I basically stated you know I'm really tired of this you know it doesn't make sense to me can't we just celebrate this person's achievements and accomplishments without making it this weird competitive thing. I don't know. And Emily, I know you are a historian and, you know, you did lots of research going into writing your obituary for Margaret. But I am going to ask you to get into a little speculative history here. I'm thinking back to Artemis II and Christina Cook being the first woman to travel to the moon. Do you think Margaret and her colleagues in the 1960s would ever imagine that a woman would be in that capsule? Not the Apollo capsule, but any particular capsule that is heading to the moon. I think they knew women would do that eventually. I don't think someone like Margaret Hamilton and her colleagues would have thought it would have taken almost 60 years. I think they would have been like, oh, yeah, this is going to happen in the next few years, you know, probably within the next 10 years or so.

I don't think they would have thought, you know, progress was going to move that slow. And indeed, if you look at 1969, it took another 14 years for U.S. women to fly in space. That's a long time. It stinks because, you know, someone like Hamilton, there were a lot of very competent women and there were women scientists, you know, in the 1960s and 70s, you know, who were more than I think qualified. If they could have learned to fly a plane like a T-38, they could have gone to space. But it's my feeling they probably didn't expect the progress to be that slow and, you know, for it to be almost 57 years later, if that makes any sense. It does. Yeah, thank you. We've been speaking with Emily Carney. She is a base plate historian and author. Her most recent sub stack piece is titled For the Love of God, Read the Woman's Obituary on Margaret Hamilton, the historic record and the need to make women smaller. Emily, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely. Anytime. That's going to do it for this week's show. If you're interested in our search for life and the universe,

check out our new podcast, When We Find Them, a limited series that explores the search for life and what happens when we find it. Get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are out on Wednesdays. Stay connected with this show. Be sure to follow us on social media. You can find Are We There Yet on Instagram and Facebook at A-W-T-Y space. And if you've got an idea for a future episode of this show, or you want to join us as a guest, reach out. Our email is arewetheryet at cfpublic.org. Are We There Yet is a production of Central Florida Public Media. Our producer is Marion Summerall. Editorial guidance comes from Latoya Dennis. Support for Are We There Yet comes from our listeners. Until next time, I'm Brendan Byrne. Thanks for listening.