SPACE 1: We're Going To Space

By Stacey Vanek Smith,

Published November 29, 2017 at 7:05 PM EST

Last year we started to look into the satellite business. It used to be that satellites were the size of a school bus and cost a half billion dollars. But the space business is changing. Private companies are competing to get tiny satellites into orbit, driving the cost down. Commercial rockets are launching around the world, carrying satellites for universities, and farmers, and oil traders.

So we, thought, what about podcasts? Who speaks for them? Why can't they go, too? Today on the show, we go looking for our own satellite.

Along the way, we meet the father of the satellite revolution, who scaled spacecraft down to the size of a box that could hold a beanie baby, and started a revolution in orbit. We visit a satellite conference and make a few offers. And we go to Planet Labs in San Francisco, a little startup that is sending up hundreds of satellites.

Music: "Through the Looking Glass" and "Victimize." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

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Stacey Vanek Smith

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.

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Elizabeth Kulas

Elizabeth Kulas is a producer on Planet Money. Before that, she produced shows at WNYC, Gimlet and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2016, she was part of the NPR team that reported on the Wells Fargo banking scandal. That reporting won a George Foster Peabody Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award and a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Before falling in love with making audio, she studied Art History and German, with a focus on life in the former East Germany. She graduated from The University of Melbourne in her native Australia, with stints at Barnard College, New York and Berlin's Free University. Right now, she's entirely obsessed with space.

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Robert Smith

Robert Smith is a host for NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the global economy is affecting our lives.

See stories by Robert Smith