If you’ve ever felt like your dream was too wild, too far, or too much — this one’s for you.

In this episode of IIAS Diaries, I sit down with Haylee Mroz to talk about the dream — where it started, how it faded, and what brought it back to life. From hiding under a dining table pretending it was a rocket ship, to flying high-G aerobatics in a pressurized spacesuit, Haylee opens up about the quiet beginnings of her astronaut journey and the moment she finally said, “This is where I’m meant to be.”

We get into what it’s really like to chase a dream that doesn’t always make sense on paper, the turns her path has taken, and how training at IIAS helped reignite her purpose. Joined by our friend Jehan Shalabi, we dive into identity, courage, and what it means to stay grounded and true to yourself in a space world that often feels out of reach.

Socials:

🔹 Haylee Mroz

🔹 Jehan Shalabi

Join the community!

🔹spacebitesbenny@gmail.com

🔹⁠https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceBiteswBenny/

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The Legacy Survey of Space and Time, is a groundbreaking 10-year survey led by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. With the most powerful digital camera ever built. LSST will scan the entire southern sky every few nights, building a dynamic, high-resolution map of the universe.

Sean MacBride is a PhD student driven by two goals: improving the instruments we use to observe the cosmos, and making sense of the data they produce to better understand our universe.

Together, LSST and Sean are getting ready to change the game. Sean helps commission the LSST camera—testing its performance, fixing issues, and making sure it’s ready for the sky. He also leads a program that enables LSST to quickly react to rare cosmic events like gravitational waves and neutrinos. And once the data starts flowing, Sean is building the tools to study dark sirens—a new way to unlock the secrets of space using light and gravity together.

Check out Sean’s website: https://seanmacb.github.io/

References:

🔹 National Geographic - LSST

🔹 LSST Official Website

🔹American Women Quarters Vera C. Rubin

🔹 Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/0805.2366

Join the community!

🔹spacebitesbenny@gmail.com

🔹⁠https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceBiteswBenny/

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What exactly is a dinosaur? Where did they come from? Why were some the size of buses and others no bigger than chickens? And did they really all go extinct?

In this episode, we travel back over 250 million years to uncover the full story of the dinosaurs — from their humble, cat-sized origins to their rise as the most dominant animals Earth has ever seen.

And yes… birds are dinosaurs.
Let’s go back in time.

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