Inside the Space Race to Save Planet Earth
1 Feb 2022 · 36 min
Janet Ivy, president of Explore Mars Inc., predicts a trillion-dollar space economy in the next 20-30 years with human landings on Mars and space hotels. She's teaching kids through Janet's Planet, which reached over 8,500 students during the pandemic, and argues space jobs will need welders, plumbers, doctors, and lawyers, not just astronauts.
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FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.
We're going inside the space race with Janet Ivy, who's president of Explore Mars Incorporated. And the creator of Janet's Planet, the award-winning and nationally syndicated children's show airing on PBS. And I'm going to tell you right now, the only way to have a conversation with Janet is to have a fun conversation with Janet. So thank you so much for joining us today.
Jaci, I'm delighted to be here.
You know, when we landed on the moon, people thought that was impossible. And now we're living in a time when the news is crazy and the whole idea of landing on Mars, people are kind of like ho-hum, whatever, you know, it's not that big of a deal. Unless one of the billionaires, you know, rockets himself out into orbit, then it becomes news. So I'm kind of wondering, what are these guys like Jeff Bezos and the Elon Musks and Richard Bransons of the world, what do they know about space that we don't know?
Well, I think what, what probably they were inspired by was the Apollo moment. Do you know what I mean? It's like every time I hear, you know, any of them speak, or they have had dreams since they were little kids of building a rocket and going to space, and they have the means to do so. I think what's interesting, because to your point about that, oh, another rover landed on Mars.
Yeah.
But in the past year, I have been on CNN, uh, this past Saturday marked my 7th time as talking about space activities. And I think you're going to see As like 2021 was kind of the year of space, right?
Mm-hmm.
On February 18th, we landed Perseverance on Mars, then Ingenuity. We finally had aerial mobility on another planet in our solar system. Wow, something can actually fly in this lessened atmosphere. And then we saw Richard Branson's company take off in that first commercial spaceflight shortly after, you know, Bezos is right behind him. And then we have Inspiration4, you know, in the fall with SpaceX, that's an Entirely granted fantastic humans. Dr. Sian Proctor, the first African American to pilot, you know, an orbital flight. Uh, Hayley Arceneaux. We had that teacher, Chris. We had Jared Isaacman, again, a billionaire.
Mm-hmm.
But all of a sudden you had normal people, hey, who had dreams of space, but normal people going into space, experiencing what it feels like. Maybe the most poignant moment of last year was when William Shatner—
Yes.
Came out. And it's like, I wanted Jeff Bezos just to be still for a moment. Like, wait on the champagne, dude. Just wait a minute. William Shatner's just had this profound moment. 'Cause he kept going, it was so black. It was just so black. And so, you know, even when you watched, you know, a football player and then the daughter of Alan Shepard, you know, kind of go on that space flight, you know, toward the end of the year, You go, this is what we know, that space is opening up for everybody. So I think we're on this interesting precipice that I, you know, after we landed on the moon in 19— like the last mission was in 1972, we were supposed to be on Mars by, you know, in the '80s along with George Jetson. And so it's taken us a good 50, 55 years to get here, you know, again. And so As we go forward, this is my— everybody's saying this and I'm going to stand with it. In the next 20 to 30 years, space and the entire space industry is going to become a trillion-dollar business. And we're going to see people go back to the moon. We're going to see the first humans put their feet on Mars. And we'll see space tourism, space hotels. If you can— if it's an absurd enough idea, it just might happen. That's, that's my favorite Einstein quote. If your idea is not absurd enough, there is no hope for it. So if it's absurd and sounds crazy, like science fiction today, you might be doing it in space in the next 20 to 30 years.
All right. So, so when you're talking to children, because you, you teach children, what, 5th grade? Is that your typical?
That, that's the tip. That's kind of like the sweet spot. So I'd say anywhere between 3rd to 8th grade, but 5th and 6th grade tend to be my sweet spot.
So when you're talking to them about space, what kind of careers are you talking to them about?
You know, it's fascinating. We normally think astronaut's the only job.
Yeah.
But it isn't. We're gonna need welders. We're gonna need plumbers. There was a problem with the toilet on the Inspiration4 SpaceX. Yeah. So you want to make sure there's a plumber. You're gonna need space medicine. You're gonna need doctors. You're gonna need space lawyers because, you know, there's that rogue booster that is about to crash land into the moon. Grateful for a guy named Bill Gray who has a software and many amateur professional astronomers have been looking at this thing. SpaceX, let me be clear, SpaceX didn't do anything wrong. It's just that the way they had to put in that Deep Space Observatory, it's like it needed that second stage, needed to— it needed all of that propulsion and energy to insert it into L1. And then by the time it was there, it didn't have enough fuel in it to come back and burn up in the atmosphere of the Earth. And it didn't have enough energy to kind of escape that Earth-Moon, um, Kind of like system. So it's been at like this derelict little, you know, 49-foot-wide material. And it's like, you know, again, in orbital mechanics, eventually things catch up, and it's basically going to just make this collision. It's on a collision course with the moon. Now it's going to land on the backside. So what one of the questions that last week in class when I was talking to the kids, I was like, so If it were to hit those, uh, there's a land— there's a Chinese lander back there as well as, um, a Chinese rover.
Okay.
Probability is low. Uh, it's in something called Aitken bases. It's like this thing's supposed to hit near the equator, near Hertzsprung Crater. Low probability that it would cause those 2 things a problem, but if it does Who, who's responsible? Are there, are there some consequences? We don't yet have those kinds of laws, or who's to say whose fault it is. Like when Russia blew up that satellite really near the International Space Station, everybody got really angry. But there's no way to prosecute. There's no way to hold someone accountable if you're not agreeing to some kind of principles. Or guiding proclamation or a space law that sort of governs, hey, you don't get to blow up things that are close to humans or other celestial objects. There's even, if you really wanna read something amazing and crazy and delicious, it's called, independent researchers have actually written sort of a manifesto called Declarations of the Rights of the Moon. Yeah, you should check that one out.
Okay. Yeah, I gotta make a note on that one.
All right.
Yeah. So, so we were talking about space careers and I went off into space law, But you're gonna have people who are going to want to be buried on the moon. You're gonna want to— you're gonna have researchers and scientists. You're gonna have like people who finally figure out how to, you know, retrieve helium-3 from the moon, bring it back to Earth. We'll have clean fusion energy. So there's going to be every kind of thing you're gonna need. You're gonna need space farmers. You're gonna need space architects. So if you need it on Earth, You're going to need it in space. So whatever it is you love down here, we need artists. I mean, space is going to be boring if it's just a bunch of engineers and scientists. So we're going to need people to create the music that like gives us kind of inspiration and art and things like that. So if we need it here on Earth, we'll need it in space.
That's pretty amazing. But from what you're telling me though, it sounds as if we need space exploration now more than ever. To save Earth is what it sounds like.
And in some ways, again, I'm a— I'm an optimist. I'll go on the record, like, I, I am blue skies and Skittles. That's what I— that's what I'm hoping for. Yeah, the hope— I believe that there have been many countries that have signed an agreement called the Artemis Accords. There have been 3 that haven't. You might guess which some of those suspects might be, but That basically say we're going to keep things around the moon open source so that if anybody wants to connect to the Gateway, it's all open source. If somebody gets in peril, these other nations agree to the degree that they can, they will go and assist and help. And so, is it possible— and this is again this big question that we'll throw out there— is it possible that space could be a path to peace? But right now we've got huge debris encircling Earth, old satellites. I mean, it can be a fleck of paint off of a space shuttle from the, you know, 1980s that can present humongous problems because it's traveling at such incredible speeds and goes in, you know, like some kind of crazy bullet to anything. So there— I mean, one of the space jobs that you could do is like, how do we get rid of space trash? There's a company from the Netherlands that has the Space Claw, the Space Net, Again, it sounds like something that would be in a sci-fi movie. But again, we can't even escape Earth's gravity well if we can't escape some of that space debris.
Mm-hmm.
So what we're doing on the International Space Station, and we've been doing it for a while, we're seeing how we can grow plants. We're seeing how animals react to microgravity. We're understanding how microgravity affects a human body. For men, it usually increases blood pressure. For women, it usually increases heart rate.
Mm-hmm.
For women, their eyes are not as affected or their vision is not as affected as men's vision tends to be. And so you have great space medicine going on. It's like, why is it that gravity is so good for our bones? Why do we— is it— why do we go through this process of decalcification when we're on microgravity? So we have learned a lot. We've learned how to grow medicines in 3D in microgravity. There might be ways if we can create a spacesuit Think of this, anybody who's listening, if you can create a spacesuit or a spacecraft that's impervious to radiation, Mm-hmm. could you just have solved some really severe after, you know, effects of chemo here on Earth or solve the problem of cancer? Um, so when you begin to think, if we can grow, like if we have greenhouses on the moon and we can grow plants like hydroponically and only kind of like fertilizing them with water and the nutrients they need, have we solved food scarcity back here on Earth? So, My hope is eventually that people will go, you know what, this space stuff is weird. And we've heard Janet talk about it for so long, but now I'm beginning to be a believer that this might be, as we innovate for out there, what we're really doing is saving the planet back here.
All right. So how did this become your life passion? I can't help but wonder.
I thought you should ask that, Jaci. So I have to go all the way back till I was 10 years old, and maybe that's why I love 5th and 6th graders so much. There was a fantastic teacher named Miss Ernestine Yarbrough Jones, Covington, Tennessee. She was in her 2nd year of teaching, and she is the light of my life. She brought a telescope to a Friday night, kind of like probably PTA meeting or something. I thought she was the smartest person ever. In the spring of that year, she assigned us all a planet. She assigned me the planet Saturn. She made me love the constellations and the solar system, and I've been loving space ever since. And, you know, that was always a love, and— but I also love my music and theater and drama. And when I was right after college, I got a job performing with and for kids at a theme park, and That across 5 years was just a glorious moment in my life. But I— when I looked around and I thought, all right, what am I really going to do with the rest of my life here? I thought, funny enough, I never thought that being with kids, doing something for kids, was going to be part of that through line or something that was really important and that I really loved. But what can I do? So I looked around and I was like, I wasn't necessarily interested in just singing songs and having kids dance, which is fine. And I love all of that. But I was like, I want to be like Miss Ernestine and like inspire them about space. So I look around, there's only Bill Nye the Science Guy and Beakman's World in the late '90s. And I was like, where, where's the female science role model? So let me ask you a question, Jaci. Who is Neil deGrasse Tyson? And Bill Nye the Science Guy's female counterpart. Who's the female counterpart to those guys?
I don't know. Is there even one?
I've been trying to be one for a very long time. I'm still on the route to do that.
I'm excluding you and the possibility of it being you simply because you're in the conversation. That's all.
Not that I don't think you are. But it's like, again, nobody would mention me. They might mention Emily Calandrelli, who's fantastic. If, you know, maybe, uh, they might mention, uh, Tamara Krynsky, who's on a show called Tomorrow's World Today. They might mention a few of the standouts of NASA, you know, Kathy Lueders, who's the associate administrator, um, you know, some people like that. Yeah, an astronaut. Um, but by and large, we say those 2 names as science communicators and science heroes, and we can't really put our thumb— I mean, emphatically say this is that female science hero. So for any— anybody out there, be that. Rise up. Decide to communicate your passion. But that was— that was, for me, was like a poignant moment when I realized I'm going to plant my flag here. I don't know how I'll do. But I'll at least give it a whirl. So that has led me on this path. Again, I just read a lot. I love this stuff. They say if you do something every day for 7 years, you can, you know, at least be knowledgeable about the topic. So I've always loved it. So it's kind of been in my bones for a long time. And I just— the truth of it is I just kind of kept showing up at space conferences. Hi. I love to work with kids. Got anything you want me to do? Uh, proof that if you, if you keep showing up and going, well, we might as well put her to work doing something. So.
No, good for you. Okay.
Perseverance is king.
But let's not be modest now because you do have the accomplishments behind you now. I mean, NASA takes you very seriously.
You know, I'm— I, again, this is like this moment where I feel silly. Because it's like, again, I just decided that this was a path I was going to go on, and along the way, you know, people have given me sort of their stamp of approval. And that's been very, very satisfying and fulfilling because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters to me is if a kid gets excited. about their inherent magnificence. I mean, here we are, all thermodynamic, you know, miracles. And if you can watch a kid see themselves becoming something and watch them kind of get excited, Miss Janet, did you know that I did this? Oh, let's celebrate this. Let's throw confetti. But that to me is this moment. And whether it's science or art, and I believe both those topics need to be taught side by side because they're the same, same parts of things. The same brain that conceives the symphony is the same brain that conceives how to do the experiment, both creative processes. But for me, that's the excitement, watching a kid, whether you're giving them a hands-on activity or you're introducing them to an astronaut or engineer, and you watch them get emboldened to ask a question. And you hear that expert say to them, why, that's a very good question. And you want to cheer for that person being a grand adult and going, That's the way we do it, right? We cheer for these little ones because one of the, the things that I've said to many a space expert and industry expert is you must mentor. You must say yes to encouraging someone behind you because 10, 20, 30 years from now, you're going to need that person to take over what you are currently dreaming. And, um, so grateful to many of the folks in the industry who, when I give them a call or an email and say, hey, can you come and talk to some kids? And they say yes. That's pretty awesome.
Now that is amazing. I'm kind of curious though, since you brought up the male-female dynamic going on in your classes today, do you see any difference between the way the male and the female students react to the idea of science and space and maybe, you know, Maybe the math associated with it or the art associated with it.
A lot of times it's— a lot of times I'll find girls are still a little afraid of their math until they get in there and realize, oh, okay, why was this like, why was I afraid of it? I am seeing more girls in my classes. I am seeing, yeah. And, but I think that's because I am a girl, right? So I'm also seeing lots of kids. across the spectrum. You can, you know what I mean? And it's like wherever you may find yourself there, it's like, I love kids on the spectrum because they can be so focused and they can love something so much and they can be an expert in their own right. But as far as girls go, it's like, here's what's really beautiful. I just had 3 kids participate and submit something for the FAA Minecraft Airport Challenge where they had to take a regional airport and then put it in Minecraft and design it. Well, these 2 guys made Abby, the girl, the project lead.
Ah.
And so she's 10, one kid is 12, I think Sean is 8. So they spanned about, you know, 4 years there. And so when they were showing us their— what they were going to submit, I said, so how was the partnership? Talk about how you guys did responsibilities. And so they were like, well, Abby was really good. like at, like, like kind of determining the best way to go. So we trusted her. So I, I'm, again, I'm blue skies and Skittles, guys. I promise you, you spend enough time with some young people and your faith in humanity will be fully restored because these 2 great young gentlemen had heard me say that the best kind of gentlemen are the ones who support their females in science. And the best kind of female scientists are the ones who decide that it is entirely okay to be smart. And so So for them to give her that position in the team, and then I just found out they are finalists for that competition. They're in the top 3. So we'll see how that works out for them.
Congratulations. That's great.
But they did it all on their own. That's the other thing that I would say to a parent or a grandparent, homeschool educators, educators in general, is that especially teachers, I bow before you guys. I will volunteer for you anytime that I am in your area. Because you guys are doing the heavy lifting. But sometimes it's like you've got too much to do in the classroom. There won't— everybody won't always gravitate to these opportunities. It's just our job to go, hey, here's something that you might consider doing, or did you know there is something else that you might consider doing? And then you let their own curiosity go down those paths of, you know, of their own making. And if they decide to engage and do, we just As a team, my class submitted something to another competition. They didn't make it into the top 55, so we dealt with our pain of not making it and going on to the next. But that's where you learn resilience, and that's where you go, this is an opportunity. It's not for you to have to do, uh, so that's kind of fun in the informal setting, is that you can offer a lot to the kids. And then whomever wants to choose to chase some of that, they can.
Well, now, how does someone actually find you though? Because I'm imagining not every school system out there has one of you.
No, it's like what we, what we had, what we did last year underneath the NASA NextGen STEM grant is you can find me at janetsplanet.com. You can make an inquiry and go, hey, would you come and talk to our kids about Mars, the solar system, space careers, whatever. And we just made ourselves available, and we've continued to do that in the 2021-2022 school year for free, just to honor the teachers who— if you want, if you want to have me, I can make, I can make a half an hour or an hour for you, and we'll find some time to talk to your students. Only because we thought that was the best way that we could serve the people doing doing the really hard work inside the school systems, especially when you've got various systems that are hybrid or trying to be virtual. You've got snowstorms, you've got pandemic, you've got all these things. So we felt like that was only the right thing to do.
Now that's pretty amazing when you think about it.
And the impact— but you know what, I'm always the one that gets way more fed in spirit than probably the kids do. So because they'll ask some crazy questions and I'm over here going Let me Google that for you. I'm always willing to admit to a kid, you know what, that is a splendid question. I can't possibly know everything. Let me, let me get back to you.
And how has it been these past 2 years with the pandemic?
Here's the funny thing, Jaci. I, if you would have told me and called me sometime in January of 2020, hey, Janet, we're going to flip everything that you do and we're going to go, you're going to go all virtual. You're not going to travel. You're not going to go in performing arts centers. You're not even going to have your summer camps. Uh, you're just going to teach online. I would have been, Jaci, I love you, but, uh, go have some coffee, take some aspirin, call me tomorrow when you're feeling better. And, um, the gift in it— here's what happened. Lockdown happened, and again, we're all in like stun gun mode, right? I was, I was home for about four or five days, and I'm, I'm watching the everything disappear off my calendar because then you're, then you start worrying about financial concerns. And I sort of sat down and cried in my coffee. And all I can tell you is in the way that spirit, divine download, however you want to talk about it, kind of compelled me and said, "You need to be with kids." I was like, "You know, you're right." So I hop. Very naively, I hopped online, I posted my Zoom link publicly. Don't do that. We learned not to do that, but I didn't know. Come and join me, let's talk about the solar system tomorrow. I had 26 kids that first day. The second day I had 76 kids, and I was like, oh. And the more that we did it, it's like other space experts weren't doing anything. Hey, I'll come talk to your kids. We had Wally Funk talk to kids. Like in our Zoom thing, kids could actually ask Wally Funk of Mercury 13. We had astronaut Nicole Stott. We had astronaut Hoot Gibson. We had geologists. We had like people who make spacesuits come and talk to the kids. And again, naively, I thought, you know, this is cute. I'll do it for a few weeks till this is over. And so then it wasn't over. So we went for 9 weeks. We held an online graduation. We pretended to, you know, do our tassel and hand out certificates. Then a friend called and said, have you seen this? This is a grant from NASA and it's everything that you've already been doing in the spring. We don't know how long this thing is going to last. You should apply. Luckily, gratefully, we were the recipient of a NASA NextGen STEM grant from September 2020 through June 1st, 2021. We Zoomed with over 8,500 kids, had about a quarter million views of all of our online, um, uh, lessons and, uh, we had a great time.
That is great.
And so the benefit of the pandemic for me is I never would have pursued a virtual component to my teaching or my brand or an extension of what Janet's Planet does. I mean, I've done it for a few times, like for places I can't go, but it would be once in a blue moon I might Zoom with a classroom. Um, now it's so ubiquitous. But it's certainly something I never would have created or done had it not been for the pandemic.
Gotcha. So when you're talking to these kids, it's not so much about education is what I'm getting from you, but more about innovation and really creating just, I guess, a thought process of creativity, which maybe they're not getting in the standard classroom today.
You know, one of the things, and again, this is no offense to teachers. is more an offense to how we organize the educational systems.
Right.
But, but we, we are so afraid of losing our funding that we teach to test, or we're so afraid that it's like another state's going to get this, that, or the other. And so it doesn't leave a lot of room for, hey, here's a big problem, how would you solve this? Or, hey, I heard about this, what would you do? And so Again, it's like, to me, that's where in that, in that 8-hour day in the educational system we currently have, we've got to create a beautiful— lady had already created this thing, but it's called Genius Hour, where you could literally give kids the opportunity to, much like Montessori school, pursue any interest, then come back and share with their class. One of the, the top-watched And most favorite things that we did, because we Zoomed and we Facebooked and we made all the stuff public, was a day that I asked all the kids to do or— sorry about that— do or perform an experiment and share it with one another. So it was kind of like science and tell.
Okay.
So here they come. And they began to kind of get empowered in how they were speaking to one another. And then this beautiful thing happened, only because you, you just gotta invite the space to do it. You can't be in a rush.
Yeah.
And if a kid's on the spectrum, you can't like rush them and not listen because you're— you wanna move on. And so it's like this one kid goes, how did you do that again? Then this kid shares, then another kid, That's really cool. And they start becoming this community that's informing one another. And so I just sat back and just laughed and watched and let them do their thing. Then a podcaster out of Germany calls, my good friend Hien, and goes, hey, I want to do this podcast with kids. So I went back to mine and I said, hey, I need you to figure out 5 slides, 5 minutes, talk to us about a science concept. And I'm telling you, there were kids— it was, it was the most shining moment. 2 brothers did theirs on why space exploration is important. Another 12-year-old had come up with this invention that is truly patentable. Um, and it was marvelous. But I think it's about the one thing that I wish that we could do and give time for is that area of innovation and creativity. Like, hey, here's the problem. How would you solve it? Let's do some research. Has anybody ever tried to solve it before? What's been done then? But that takes time that isn't like on the standardized test, that isn't part of the necessary— necessarily the unit. So for those beautiful creative teachers and educators out there who figure out a way to incorporate that within what they've got to— whoops— what they've got to teach and everything, bravo to you. But we need to do more of that, in my opinion.
Yeah. What of your students? Who's the most remarkable to you?
Oh, goodness. No way that I can answer that one. That's the thing. They are all each so very amazing and marvelous in and of their own right. So it would be, it would be Lucia, who is you know, quiet and reserved, but an observer. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like there is like— to watch how she has come out of her shell is nothing but beauty. She has done every single experiment I've ever asked of her. You've got Abby, who like is triumphing over a painful kind of like rare disease. And yet she's the girl lead in this FAA Minecraft challenge.
Yeah.
You've got Maggie and Evie, who are sisters who have Like, again, built and tried everything and are artists and love origami and love geology and rocks. Or there's Ryland in Texas who is doing his karate and horse riding and loving his science. Brian and Sean, Nathan, Ander, Jesse, Tapaswini, Sachita, Niara. It's like all of these— and Lucas. It's like I'm going to leave somebody out. Um, It isn't just one. It is— I feel like it's their collective. And Judah, Bree, it's like they are all so marvelous as who they are. And some of them are writers. They'll go, Miss Janet, I've written a story. Can I read it to you? Absolutely. So we make time for them to read it. Sometimes it goes on longer than you, uh, you know, you're going, mm-hmm. You wait and you let that moment happen. I don't know if anybody remembers, there was a book that came out, I think in the late '90s, early 2000s, called Teacher, the geranium on the windowsill just died and you went right on. And it's a collection of poems and observations from kids that were written specifically to parents and educators about things that the kids would change in how grown-ups do things. And for me, that's such a powerful— that was such a powerful teacher of how I want to be with kids, is even if it takes a little longer, Even if it feels like it goes on for a while, giving them space to express their thoughts, their imaginings, what's important to them becomes so important. And I felt like that was super important in the pandemic. So if Maggie says, hey, Miss Janet, you want to see my pet snake Toby?
Sure.
Toby, on in. And we'd spend— and Then I was like— she goes, when we see each other, you can hold it. And I was like, I'm a little scared, Maggie. So then she— I invite her, I was like, well, debunk some myths about snakes so that I will feel more comfortable when I get to meet Toby. And she did a 45-minute presentation on why I should really like reptiles. I was like, all right, you convinced me. So again, I realize it's like we, we don't always have that time, but I just keep going. This time for them as a kid passes by so quickly. I know for parents and other grown-ups— I never had kids myself, so maybe that's why I can sit there for forever, just because there's so much joy in hanging out with them. But when we find out who they are— okay, Maggie loves her snakes and her art. Jesse loves to be funny and do voices and Hamilton, and, you know, also wants to teach us how to draw something. Nathan is over there building a new his garage and welding and has already named his aerospace company. Once— and it doesn't matter whether we are 10 or 20 or 55 or 90, we want to be known. And once the kids know they are known and loved and cared about, I could ask them today, can you build me something that you can take me to the moon? They're like, yes, Miss Janet, we'll get right on that. And again, not because I'm awesome. But because I know they know that down deep in my heart, I love them so.
And on that note, we're out of time. Can you believe it went that fast?
Well, like I said, it does go fast. Thank you so much. And again, if anybody wants to reach out, uh, talk about Mars and me being Explore Mars president and stuff like that, just reach out to me at janet@janetsplanet.com. You can also fill out a form on janetsplanet.com to invite me in to talk about solar system. Um, Again, it's just— I love seeing kids get excited, and really mostly I love encouraging them to stand in their inherent magnificence.
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