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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What are spacesuits, and why are they essential for astronauts? In this episode, we explore these questions with Stephanie Johnston, a former NASA engineer and astronaut trainer who worked on spacesuit innovations for the Artemis Program.

Tune in for a fascinating conversation that blends science, stories, and inspiration.

Join the community:

🔹spacebitesbenny@gmail.com

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

Stephanie’s Social Media

🔹 Linked in:https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniejohnston334/

🔹Website: https://gatheringmoonbows.com/about/

NASA Astronaut Peggy Whitson, It Takes a NASA Village... To Train an Astronaut

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In this episode of IIAS Diaries, I sit down with Noel Padinjattekara — a driven and down-to-earth aspiring astronaut based in Boston, with roots in Kerala, India. By day, he’s worked in biotech and medical research with some of the top institutions in Boston. But his sights have always been set much higher — quite literally.

Noel shares how childhood flights to India and sketching rockets in school sparked a lifelong dream: becoming a NASA astronaut. Today, he's building toward that goal — training as a pilot, diving into hypoxia and G-force simulations, and preparing to join the U.S. Air Force as an officer.

We talk about:

• What it’s really like to train your mind and body for space
• His “LinkedIn on the Go” approach to networking while Uber driving
• How biotech and aerospace medicine go hand-in-hand in human spaceflight
• The importance of global collaboration in making space accessible to everyone

• 
  

Noel’s story is about more than just space — it’s about grit, purpose, and staying grounded while chasing something bigger than yourself. Whether you're into space, science, or just good stories — this one’s worth a listen.

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We journey back 13.8 billion years to uncover the oldest light in existence — the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

Often called the universe’s “baby picture,” the CMB is more than a snapshot — it's a fossil of the Big Bang itself, etched into the sky in microwaves. We’ll break down what the CMB is, how it formed, how it’s detected, and why it changed the course of cosmology forever. From blackbody radiation and photon decoupling to pigeons, Planck, and primordial ripples, this episode unpacks how a faint hiss across the sky became the smoking gun for the Big Bang.

This is the story of the universe’s first light — and what it still reveals to us today.

References:

▪️Introduction to Cosmology - Barbara Rayden

▪️Lecture notes in Cosmology - Oliver Piattella

Should read:

▪️The First Three Minutes – Steven Weinberg

▪️Cosmos – Carl Sagan

▪️The Road to Reality – Roger Penrose

Special thanks to Matteo Magi

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In this episode, we zoom all the way out — before we dive into equations, galaxies, or dark energy — to ask the most important question: What even is cosmology?

References:

🔵 Introduction to Cosmology - Barbara Rayden

🔵 Lecture notes in Cosmology - Oliver Piattella

Should read:

🔵 The First Three Minutes – Steven Weinberg

🔵 Cosmos – Carl Sagan

🔵 The Road to Reality – Roger Penrose

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Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime that reveal the universe’s most powerful events. In this episode, we break down the physics of waves, how GW travel through space and time, and why space itself can stretch and squeeze. We explore sources like pulsars and black hole mergers, the astrophysical types of GW, and the mysteries of cosmic inflation—how it solves the flatness and monopole problems and shapes the universe’s expansion.

We also discuss the importance of science outreach, representation, and giving back.

Interferometers: https://lisa.nasa.gov/

Ligo: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/WA

Virgo: https://www.virgo-gw.eu/

Kagra: https://gwcenter.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/

Social Media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raphael-bertrand-delgado/

Photography Portfolio: https://www.behance.net/raphaelbertrand1

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