288: FLIP-ing Out at Astrolab: A Moon Rover, a Clean Room, and Thousands of Your STORIES

There are moments in space exploration when you realize that you're witnessing something that future generations are gonna read about in history books, not because a rocket is launching and not because astronauts are boarding a spacecraft, but because someone is building the infrastructure that will make all of these future missions possible, and that's Astro Lab.

Now, I recently had the opportunity to go out to Hawthorne, California, where I walked away with a feeling I haven't had in quite some time, the feeling that the future isn't coming, it's already here And today I want to take you behind the scenes of my visit to Astrolab, and I want to explain to you the Flip Rover, something I want you to hear.

If you haven't heard it already, I'm going to explain it to you.

What it is, why we should care so much, why NASA cares so much about lunar mobility, and why this mission is connected to our return and humanity's return to the Moon, not just robotics.

But how it's going to help place thousands of humans on the lunar surface, and it might be one of the most meaningful things we've ever done.

And most importantly, why Stories of Space is an important part of this journey that ties it all together.

So let's start with the basics.

I'm going to break it down for you the who, what, where, when, why.

This is how I love to do things.

It's my-- from my journalistic days.

Um, let's start with Astrolab.

Okay.

Astrolab headquarters is home to this lunar rover called the Flip Rover that will carry the Stories of Space Mission Six to the lunar surface.

Now, in the past, and if you're unfamiliar with Stories of Space, we have carried-- Here are some of the small micro SD cards, I know it has a little bit of a glare to it, that we-- these actual cards have been tucked into a Missy container with Aegis Aerospace and flown on the International Space Station.

These cards have also been underwater with us as we explored the oceans-- the ocean floor, uh, last summer.

So your stories have gone on a number of missions, and traditionally, they've been in the form of us downloading them all from the database and putting them on these micro SD cards and taking them with us.

And when I say us, sometimes it's physically with me, and I carry them with so much love and protection through the airports and security and underwater.

[laughs] But sometimes I have to give it over to NASA so that they can tuck them away and launch them to space, where they spent over eight months nearly on the International Space Station, orbiting over one million orbits of the Earth.

So these stories are foundational, they're phenomenal, they're yours, and it's been our privilege.

So now we are taking these stories, and we're going to take them to the lunar surface with the help of Astrolab.

Now, they're not gonna look like this.

They're not in a micro SD form this time.

They're engraved with a laser onto a 5D crystal.

Now, if you want to learn more about that, I encourage you to go to storiesofspace.com, our website, where you can learn more about the 5D crystal etching and how it works.

It's really quite cool.