NASA missions, explained from the engineering floor.
Small Steps, Giant Leaps follows NASA people working through the practical problems behind exploration. Recent episodes move from Pandora’s exoplanet observations to astronaut splashdown recovery, Dragonfly’s Titan design, lunar regolith simulants, solar sails, and the X-59’s quiet supersonic research.
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Small Steps, Giant Leaps is a NASA show about the engineering culture behind exploration. It follows people working close to missions, hardware, operations, and strategy, then asks how the work actually gets done. The scale is cosmic, but the emphasis is practical. Recent episodes range from Pandora, a small satellite mission supporting exoplanet atmosphere studies, to Dragonfly, the spacecraft planned for Titan. Other conversations stay closer to Earth, including astronaut recovery after ocean splashdown and the X-59 experimental aircraft’s quiet supersonic research. The show likes the middle layer between vision and launch. That is where review boards, simulations, deployment mechanisms, modelers, file naming, software warnings, and recovery procedures live. Andres Almeida guides the interviews in a clean explanatory style, usually starting with the mission premise before moving into the guest’s role and the decisions behind it. The best moments come when guests describe constraints that do not fit a poster: active stars interfering with exoplanet readings, Titan’s tightly coupled lander systems, or solar sail deployment that cannot be manually corrected once it starts. There is real wonder here. It is just grounded in process. The lunar and Martian regolith episode turns dust into an engineering problem involving chemistry, mechanics, milling, grinding, batch consistency, and construction planning. The Commercial Crew recovery episode treats splashdown as choreography, communication, flexibility, and crew input. The Mars roadmap conversation brings systems engineering into long-term human exploration. Across the episodes, the show rewards listeners who want NASA explained by the people solving the hard parts, not only announcing the destination.
Made for: For space-curious listeners who want mission design, operations, and research explained in clear terms. It fits people drawn to NASA, aerospace engineering, planetary science, and the practical work behind exploration.
What sets it apart: The show stands apart by foregrounding NASA’s technical workforce and mission partners rather than treating spaceflight as spectacle. It turns each topic into a grounded look at trade-offs, testing, safety, and systems thinking.
NASA’s technical workforce put boots on the Moon, tire tracks on Mars, and the first reusable spacecraft in orbit around the Earth. Learn what’s next as they build missions that redefine the future with amazing discoveries and remarkable innovations.
This is where a sonic thump and a methane moon become engineering decisions you can actually follow.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A measured look at the engineering choices behind NASA's Dragonfly mission to Titan.
NASA's Dragonfly mission to Titan becomes a grounded story about engineering under unfamiliar conditions. Dr. Zippy Turtle, the mission's principal investigator and a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, lays out how the lander's legs are designed to…
NASA's X-59 makes the sonic boom feel like an engineering problem with a quieter future in view.
For decades, the barrier to faster-than-sound passenger flight over land has been less about speed than noise. Small Steps, Giant Leaps uses NASA's X-59 experimental plane to frame that problem clearly, following the effort to turn a disruptive sonic boom into something closer…
KBR engineers and experts unpack wind energy, Artemis imagery, and cybersecurity compliance.
Australian headlines, quickly made human.
Aruba's public square, live on mic.
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NASA Recovery Director Christine St.
NASA's Deputy Associate Administrator discusses the agency's strategy and architecture for sustainable human exploration of the Moon and Mars.
NASA principal investigator Zippy Turtle explains how Dragonfly will use an X-8 octocopter to explore Saturn’s moon Titan, whose dense nitrogen-and-methane atmosphere contains complex carbon-rich molecules.
NASA engineer Jennifer Lu discusses her diverse roles in the Commercial Crew Program and Artemis missions, and her unexpected path from circus performer to aerospace engineer.
Small Steps, Giant Leaps host Andres Almeida talks with NASA test pilot David Niels Larson about the X-59, an experimental jet designed to turn a sonic boom into a quieter "sonic thump." Larson explains that a more than 50-year-old ban on supersonic flight over land exists because of the sonic boom, and describes design features like the X-59's long nose and top-mounted engine that reshape the shockwaves.
Small Steps, Giant Leaps host Andres Almeida interviews Savannah Bullard, Strategic Communications Lead for NASA’s Centennial Challenges Program Office, about public prize competitions for space technology.
Eric Mamajek says planets are basically ubiquitous, citing Kepler's finding of perhaps trillions of planets in our galaxy.
NASA's SPHEREx mission aims to map the sky in unprecedented detail to study the universe's origin, galaxy evolution, and the location of life-essential ices in the Milky Way.
NASA's IPEx robot is designed to mine oxygen from lunar regolith to support sustainable human presence on the moon.
NASA's Jericho Locke discusses a new report comparing cost-effective strategies to reduce orbital debris collision risks.
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NASA's PACE mission uses satellite technology to study aerosols and clouds, exploring their interactions and impact on Earth's climate.