Weekly Space Hangout – January 6, 2017: Abigail “Astronaut Abby” Harrison

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA1TsL0R1Ns

Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain)

Special Guests:
This week’s guest is Abigail “Astronaut Abby” Harrison. Abigail is the founder of The Mars Generation nonprofit. Currently a sophomore at Wellesley College in Massachusetts majoring in Astrobiology and Russian. Harrison is positioned to enter a PhD program upon graduation and continue her pursuit of becoming a scientist, astronaut and member of the first human crew to land on Mars in the 2030’s. Hundreds of thousands of supporters from around the world follow her journey to becoming an astronaut via the blog Harrison authors at AstronautAbby.org.

The Mars Generation is a 510c3 nonprofit in the United States. The organization is volunteer-driven with a board of directors that includes astronauts, engineers, scientists and professionals from the nonprofit and business communities. With a reach of more than 10 million people in the organization’s first year of operation and more than 650 students from around the world participating in its Student Space Ambassador Leadership Program, over 600 donors, 350 members and several space industry sponsors in place, the organization continues to grow and offer programs to excite and educate students and adults about the importance of human space exploration and STEM education.

Guests:

Alessondra Springmann (sondy.com / @sondy)
Dave Dickinson (www.astroguyz.com / @astroguyz)
Yoav Landsman (@MasaCritit)

Their stories this week:

Discovery missions
101 Astronomy Events for 2017
SpaceX is back in business!

We use a tool called Trello to submit and vote on stories we would like to see covered each week, and then Fraser will be selecting the stories from there. Here is the link to the Trello WSH page (http://bit.ly/WSHVote), which you can see without logging in. If you’d like to vote, just create a login and help us decide what to cover!

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We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Friday at 12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Universe Today, or the Universe Today YouTube page<