Melissa Sevigny

Um, I'd like to bring up, uh, a couple of your other works.

Uh, and I was really interested in, uh, Under the Desert Sky.

Uh, you wrote it in 2016.

Uh, but a- and as I understand, you had a grant from NASA.

Can you kinda tell us a little bit about that book?

Yeah, that was a lot of fun.

That was actually my undergrad project.

Um, I got a grant through the Space Gr- Space Grant program, which is a really wonderful, um, a wonderful program that gets undergraduates involved in science.

And, uh, instead of getting a science job, I got a journalism job, which was, it was my first experience really with what, what turned out to be my career path.

Uh, and the job was to interview old-timers at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and capture their stories.

Um, so there were still folks there at the time who had been involved with the Apollo era and even before, had all these amazing stories about how Tucson was really, like, the central science place for people who wanted to know about the moon-

Yeah

... which people didn't really know anything about the moon back when we started thinking about putting astronauts up there.

Uh, so it was just a lot of fun to do those interviews, and at the end of that Space Grant project, I, I went to my mentor, who was the director of the lab, Mike Drake, and I said, "I'd, I'd like to keep working on this." And so he kept me on for a couple of years and compiled a bunch of interviews, and eventually that turned into the book.

Well, the, the, you know, I've found with, uh, doing this podcast, it's so fascinating to sit with people and hear their stories, especially when it's, uh, so relevant to a subject, right? Like, here a lot of my stuff is, uh, around Grand Canyon and stuff, but that must have been a fascinating project to do your, uh, research and-

and-It was so great.

Yeah, it's funny, I just came from earlier today I met, um, Ewan Whitaker's daughter is here in town, and I, I just met her earlier today.

Um, he was one of the main characters in that book.

He was really instrumental in the early, early mapping of the moon, and he did that without having a formal education.

Came over from England and just got right involved in the Apollo era, and just really wonderful people.

I got to meet really amazing people with cool stories.

Well, like you say, it's generational, you know.

Some of these amazing people that were involved with the early NASA, uh, program and stuff, it, there seems to be a generational handoff to their kids and stuff, like you see with a lot of things in the world, you know.

Th- and that's really cool that you have access, and probably really enhances your access to materials and stuff, uh.

Yeah, that was the project where I really learned how to do journalism and do interviews.