Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science · The Planetary Society

Book Club Edition: Planetary Society Chief Scientist Bruce Betts’ latest for kids

·57 min·3 clips

Bruce says near-Earth asteroids include about a million objects large enough to cause damage, but only 40,000 have been found.

Matt Kaplan opens the book-club edition with a familiar welcome. He introduces Bruce Betts as the Planetary Society's chief scientist and the mind behind two books for young readers, The Size of Space and Are We Alone?, which try to make the cosmos feel immediate rather than distant. The conversation begins with scale. Betts talks through how the immensity of space can be made easier to grasp without draining away the wonder, and why that kind of translation matters if astronomy is going to feel welcoming instead of remote. The question of life stays at the center. Are We Alone? brings the show back to one of science's biggest questions and to the core of the Planetary Society's mission, and the discussion treats it as a real scientific problem, not just a slogan. Kaplan also places the books within Betts' longer career. He notes Betts' many years at the Planetary Society, his Ph.D. studies at Caltech overseen by co-founder Bruce Murray, his three years at NASA HQ, and his work on the LightSail solar sail project, so the listener gets a sense of where the books come from and why they land with weight. The talk then shifts to planetary defense. Betts lays out the sequence that matters most: find near-Earth objects, track them, and get basic characterization, especially whether their orbit is targeting Earth, before even thinking about changing that orbit. The idea is practical. He returns to the fact that the real challenge is knowing what is out there early enough to do anything useful, which gives the segment its urgency. NEO Surveyor gets a clear explanation. Betts describes the planned space-based telescope as the long-awaited response to the Sunward blind spot, with a vantage point toward Earth-Sun L1 and an infrared design meant to widen the search. The Sun remains the problem. He points out that objects arriving from that direction are hard to see from the ground and refers to a 2013 event that was not picked up, which makes the case for the mission feel immediate. The episode closes with forward motion. Kaplan thanks Betts, points listeners to the books, and tees up the next book-club edition with astronomer and astrobiologist Caleb Scharf and The Giant Leap on March 14.

As heard by us

A clear, practical space conversation that makes kids' books and planetary defense feel accessible.

Bruce Betts turns a book-club conversation into something roomy without making it feel remote. The episode moves through his two young-reader books, The Size of Space and Are We Alone?, and keeps circling back to the ideas that shape his work: scale, life elsewhere, LightSail,…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want kids' space books that open onto real planetary defense thinking.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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