Over the years I spent as a graduate student at Western University I enjoyed a lot of great friends and had my fair share of shenanigans. Shenanigans bolstered by weekly traditions that made the harsh reality of grad school bearable. These included Foosball Friday, Trivia on Sundays, Moosehead Mondays, Tuesday night cheap movies, and Sunday night dinners.

One more-academic tradition was Space Club, which I actually tried to rebrand as Planet Club given my distaste for astronomy. Whatever it was called, it was a weekly gathering at the Grad Club (campus bar) in which local Space Professor Phil Stooke presented the week’s news in space exploration. Given that I was teaching Space Exploration (or acting as Phil’s Teaching Assistant) for much of this time, it was invaluable to have such a fun reason to keep up to date on space-happenings.

When my grad school kin and I dispersed from Western to become underpaid, over-qualified, precariat, we missed both the comradery and keen space-awareness provided by Space Club.

About two and a half years after the leaving Western, my intrepid space-writing partner, Tanya Harrison, and I wanted to recreate the magic. After we did an exploratory live Youtube chat with Phil to hock our book For All Humankind, we decided we could do it now and take advantage of everyone’s new found familiarity with virtual presentations.

So, I present to you SPACE CLUB the extended voyage, or SPAEC CLUB X-V. We will be doing a monthly breakdown of news in space. We’re not doing this for views or in pursuit of fabled social media fame. It’s really just a reason to get together and keep up to date on space. However, the ethos of Space Club was always that it was open to anyone who wanted to take a seat and learn about space. So we’re extending that to the digital world of Youtube.

If you’re interested, we hope you join monthly use live Monthly to hear about the latest in planetary science (I refuse to discuss anything past the Oort Cloud), ask questions, and get to know us and our varied careers.

See on the interenets!

Danny