Europe's place in outer space
The last time we interviewed the physicist Meganne Christian, she was working on the French-Italian research base on Antarctica. Now she has her eye on outer space. We ring her up to find out more about her new life as a reserve astronaut for the European Space Agency, and Europe's role in the new commercial space era. We're also talking about Pedro Sánchez's Spanish election gamble and a hopeful court verdict for same-sex Romanian couples.
Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast and would like to help us keep making it, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month at patreon.com/europeanspodcast (many currencies are available). You can also help new listeners find the show by leaving us a review or giving us five stars on Spotify.
You can follow Meganne here on Twitter and Instagram, and the ESA here and here. The report on Europe's future role in space exploration can be found here, and you can find out more about the ESA astronaut selection process here. Some other links you might want to check out:
ESA Space Ambition book
ESA Terrae Novae 2030+ Strategy Roadmap
International Space Station Benefits for Humanity 2022
ESA Human Spaceflight on Twitter
This week's Isolation Inspiration: 'The [Queer] Politics of Eurovision' from verilybitchie, and This Is Love: The Museum of Broken Relationships.
00:22 Welcome to the western-most peninsulas of Eurasia
03:28 Bad Week: Spain's Socialists
11:36 Good Week: LGBT couples in Romania
20:53 Interview: Meganne Christian on life as a reserve astronaut and what Europe is up to in space
32:53 Isolation Inspiration: The Queer Politics of Eurovision and The Museum of Broken Relationships
35:09 Happy Ending: Cheers to you, Gert-Jan
Producers: Katy Lee and Wojciech Oleksiak
Mixing and mastering: Wojciech Oleksiak
Music: Jim Barne and Mariska Martina
Twitter | Instagram | hello@europeanspodcast.com
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
DOMINIC: Hello, and welcome to the podcast that tries to help you understand what's going on in this collection of countries that make up the western most peninsulas of Eurasia.
KATY: Is that what we're going by these days?
D: Yes, that's what we're calling it.
K: Okay.
D: We do that by sharing the weird, the wonderful, and occasionally, the wearisome stories from this oddball collection of countries. I'm Dominic Kraemer, speaking to you from a very sunny Amsterdam, and as ever, that voice you heard earlier was from Katy Lee, who's in Paris. How are you, Katy?
K: I'm good. It's also very nice and sunny here. Although I do think the weather has gone to some people's heads a bit, I was at my local swimming pool this week, and there was a fight – like, an actual punch-up.
D: In the pool?!
K: Yeah! There was all of this thrashing and splashing and swearing, and things got so bad that they actually had to cut off the music for the aquarobics class.
D: Woah. That's epic. I wish someone had filmed it, it sounds like it would have gone viral.
K: Maybe. I'm pretty sure that it involved a crash, because Parisian swimming pools have this completely insane organisation system. I don't know what it's like over there in the Netherlands, but in the UK, there's a slow lane and a medium lane and a fast lane. But here in Paris, we organise things by the type of swimming, the stroke. So there's a front crawl lane, and a backstroke lane. And that means that people of all speeds are in the same lane, and they're constantly crashing into each other. It is chaos.
D: Oh, that sounds really silly.
K: I mean, I love my city very much, and my adopted country too, but this is just one thing that doesn't make sense here. Sorry, France. I'd be really curious to hear about how it works in other European countries – let me know, listeners. What have you been up to over there in Amsterdam? Any punch-ups in swimming pools?
D: No, I've been battling with a flea infestation with my cat.
K: Oh no!
D: Which has been pretty miserable. But everything is fine here in Amsterdam. And our canals have at least not turned fluorescent green this week, which is more than can be said for the Grand Canal in Venice. Did you see the pictures?
K: Yeah, so weird! And at the time of recording, we don't really know what it is, do we?
D: No! Very mysterious. And talking of mysteries, we're going to be heading into the most mysterious place there is: into outer space, today. We're going to be speaking to a longtime friend of the show, Meganne Christian, who was recently selected out of tens of thousands of applicants to be a reserve astronaut for the European Space Agency. We'll be talking to her about what it's been like to be selected to potentially go into space, and we'll discuss what the European Space Agency is up to these days and what the commercialisation of space means for Europe. Meganne is the best, I cannot wait for you to hear this interview. But first, it's time for Good Week, Bad Week.
BAD WEEK - 3’28”
D: Who are you giving Bad Week to, Katy?
K: Well, it's been a busy time for elections across Europe of late. Greece's conservative government getting a really strong new mandate, despite some worrying trends that we've talked about on this podcast in recent months. Turkey – results pretty close to what our guest predicted a couple of weeks back actually, and in any case a victory for Erdogan. But this week, I wanted to take a look at Spain's elections and give Bad Week to the Socialist Party of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. These weren't national elections, they were local and regional ones. But in the run-up to voting over the weekend, these elections were widely seen as something that was going to be basically an expression of how people are feeling about the Socialist-led national government. And the results for the Socialists were not good. So not good, in fact, that the prime minister has taken the rather bold move of calling a general election for next month. There was going to be a general election anyway in December, but Sánchez has now decided to move those elections forward to July 23.
D: If he's doing so badly in the polls, if the Socialists are doing so badly in the polls, why would he want to bring the election forward? Wouldn't he want to leave it until maybe the polls go up again?
K: Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? Sánchez has a reputation as being a bit of a political gambler, and I guess this is him doing that again. You might think, as you say, that given the Socialists have just had a crap election, having some more time to recover from that might be good. I guess the logic is that the less time that the Right have to campaign, the less they can build on their new momentum. Sánchez has caught them by surprise. I was also reading an interesting piece in El País just now that suggested that Sánchez has done this to change the conversation. So now, instead of days of headlines going on about how badly the Socialists did in these regional elections, we are immediately in campaign mode, and all the attention has switched to, okay, who is offering what to the nation as a whole?
D: And so, just how badly did the Socialists actually do in this election? Was it a total disaster?
K: I mean, if you look at the percentage of the vote that the different parties got, the Socialists didn't do that badly. They got 28.2% of all of these municipal votes across the country, which is just a few percent below the main conservative opposition, the People's Party, who got 31.5%. So, pretty close. But when you look at how the voting played out in terms of which parties now get to control big city halls and regional governments, it's a pretty big swing towards the conservative People's Party. There were some pretty eye-catching victories in Seville and Valencia. There were 12 regions up for grabs in all, and at the time of recording, it looks like the People's Party are going to govern at least six of them compared to just three for the Socialists. And regional governments are quite powerful in Spain, they have a lot of devolved powers. I should also add that in several of the regions where the People's Party won, it looks like they're gonna have to govern in coalition with the far-right party Vox. And that is something that people are now really interested in, when it comes to looking at next month's national elections: could we end up with a situation where this far-right party, who were once considered really fringe and who regularly spout, you know, hate speech against migrants – could we end up with a situation where they could actually end up in power nationally as part of a coalition? It's a pretty grim prospect.
D: If you've been getting all of your Spanish political news from this podcast exclusively, then I guess these results might be quite a surprise, because I don't think any government has ever received Good Week so many times on this podcast as Pedro Sánchez’s.
K: Right!
D: There have been quite a lot of really eye-catching and innovative sounding policies over the last few years. Why have they not been translating into increased support for Sánchez’s government?
K: Yeah, it's really interesting. And when you look at, you know, things like how Spain's been doing economically, their economic growth has been better than the EU average of late, unemployment is below what it has been since the 2008 financial crisis. And yeah, the Socialists have brought in a bunch of policies that are actually popular, things like raising the minimum wage. There is a cost of living crisis, same as everywhere. And it does seem like Sánchez himself is personally pretty unpopular. Some people don't trust him, apparently, because before the last general elections, he said that he would never go into coalition with far-left parties. And then lo and behold, to form a government, he did a deal with Podemos, a party a fair bit further to the left than his own. The conservatives have also been attacking Sánchez a lot for relying on support from Catalan and Basque nationalists in Parliament to get his policies through. And there are also a couple of other forces at play in Spain that have benefited the right and caused trouble on the Left lately. One of them is that the centrist party Ciudadanos, who seemed to have a fair amount of momentum just a few years ago – they have been basically wiped off the political map, and all of their support has gone to the People's Party. And the Left, meanwhile, have fractured. Not the first time that we've talked about that happening in a European country, leftwingers struggling with infighting. Podemos, this left-wing kind of populist party that ended up in the national coalition with the Socialists, they had emerged as a really powerful force in the middle of the last decades out of street protest movements. But they've been doing worse and worse in subsequent elections. And recently, they got really heavily criticised for a new law that was supposed to be about sexual consent, but it inadvertently led to hundreds of sex offenders having their prison sentences reduced because it had a loophole in it. There's also this new rising party on the left called Sumar led by Yolanda Díaz. She's the labour minister, and she's quite charismatic. So she's going to be an interesting person to watch in these forthcoming national elections. But it's also a further splintering of the Left, you know?
D: Yeah. I never know how useful it is to try and look for, like, pan-European political trends. But to what extent can we look at this move away from the Socialists as like a European trend to the Right?
K: Honestly, I never know how useful it is either. I mean, there’s so many elections on this continent all the time that you get the impression that political analysts can always point to, like, three or four recent elections where parties of a similar political persuasion seem to have done well or badly. But yeah, it's true that this comes pretty hot on the heels of the Greek conservatives doing really well , Erdogan in Turkey of course, and in Spain, one of the most talked-about victories was that of Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the Madrid region. She is sometimes referred to as Spain's answer to Donald Trump, in terms of the populist right-wing rhetoric that she uses. She infamously accused migrants of spreading COVID, for instance. And she just managed to secure an absolute majority, which feels kind of like an indication of the mood to some extent. And in another quite symbolic blow to the Left, Ada Colau, the left-wing mayor of Barcelona, she appears at the time of recording to have lost control of City Hall. I don't know. I think it's going to be really interesting to see how the Left and Right go into this election, in terms of their strategies. And I wonder if Sánchez is maybe going to try to persuade voters that this general election needs to be seen as a moment where there is a very real threat that the far-right could get into power. That strategy was used in Portugal's elections fairly recently. And maybe Sánchez will argue that in the face of this threat, the Left needs to mobilise en masse and be more united. That's what I’d do if I was him. But I'm not the prime minister. Nobody asked me.
D: Katy for Spanish Prime Minister?
K: Gracias. Who has had a good week?
GOOD WEEK - 11'36”
D: Well, on last week's episode, after five and a half years of making a podcast about Europe, we finally got to grips a bit with the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights thanks to our producer Katz Laszlo, who brought us up to speed on a huge climate case that's been going through that court. Go and listen to that episode immediately if you haven't already, we are very proud of it. But seeing as I now understand what this court does and how it works – a bit anyway – I thought I would stay on the European Court of Human Rights train this week and give Good Week to LGBT couples in Romania after this Strasbourg court condemned the Romanian government for refusing to recognise unions of same-sex couples.
K: Interesting is this like the Swiss case where, you know, that time it was like 2000 older Swiss ladies who kind of banded together to make a case – is this like 2000 gay Romanian couples, or something?
D: It's not quite the same numbers as that Swiss case. In this case, it was 21 same-sex couples, all Romanian nationals who brought their legal complaint against Romania to the court back in 2019 and 2020. So it's taken quite a while for the court to come to this ruling. But as we learned last week, they're very busy. And sometimes these decisions do take quite some time. But Katy, seeing as we're now experts, maybe you can help me in explaining why the Romanian courts were condemned in this case. What is the convention that the European Court of Human Rights is based on?
K: Oh God. Is it the European Convention of Human Rights?
D: Yes, very good!
K: Of human rights? On human rights? Which one is it?
D: On human rights. And the judges of the court ruled five to two that the Romanian government were violating Article 8 of this Convention on Human Rights. What is Article 8, Katy?
K: That is not fair! We didn't go through the numbers.
D: No, that's true. Fair enough, that was an unfair question. Article 8 is the right to respect for private and family life. And the couples that filed the complaints argued that the failure to acknowledge them legally as families had a number of different discriminatory consequences. They cited a lack of access to family medical insurance, certain property rights only afforded to legal couples, and the laws around health care decisions also weren't favourable to them.
K: So do Romania actually need to change their laws now?
D: Well, not immediately, the Romanian government have, I think, three months to decide if they want to refer to the European Court of Human Rights top court, the Grand Chamber.
K: The Grand Chamber!
D: The court could refuse this referral and say, ‘No, you don't have a right to refer it to us, deal with it.’ If that happens, or if Romania do get the right to have it heard by the Grand Chamber but they still lose, then there will be a legal obligation for Romania to change the law and recognise the rights of same-sex couples. And this could even be enforced with sanctions imposed by the Council of Europe if Romania fails to comply.
K: And what is life generally like for LGBTQ+ people in Romania? I mean, is the fact that families like this have barely any rights part of a larger trend of more, you know, kind of generalised homophobia by the government, or not so much?
D: Yeah, I think it is. Romania sits very low in this Rainbow Europe rankings of human rights for LGBTI people. Romania sits in 41st place out of 49 European countries and are said to have only secured 18% of possible LGBTI human rights. Homosexuality was only decriminalised in 2001, which is pretty remarkably recent. And as is clear from this case, there is still no legal recognition for same-sex couples. And this might have something to do with the very influential Romanian Orthodox Church who actually said in a press release, ‘Civil partnership is the toxic source, as seen in other societies, of the dissolution of the family's importance and morally formative authority.’ This argument was actually explicitly rejected by the judges of the Strasbourg court who said the following in their ruling, they said: ‘Allowing the recognition of same-sex unions would not undermine the institution of marriage, since heterosexual couples can still marry.’ Quite nice, simple logic, I like it.
K: I like it too.
D: But same-sex unions do not seem to have the backing of a majority of Romanians, and most of the political parties do not openly support a change in the law along the lines with what the European Court of Human Rights are insisting. There was, in fact, even a referendum in 2018, following a citizen's initiative to amend the constitution of Romania so that same-sex marriage would be banned. This, however, failed to reach the minimum 30% turnout threshold for it to be binding. So I think we should just look at this court ruling as a good step forward for same-sex couples in Romania. But of course, it isn't going to fix the day-to-day discrimination they are experiencing quite yet.
K: One thing I learned from last week's special episode is that in that climate case that we talked about, the ruling is going to be binding on all countries that are part of the Council of Europe, which is 46 countries. So not just Switzerland, which was the one that was being sued. Is that the case here? Like is what happens in this case binding on all countries in Europe?
D: Well, actually, this is not the first ruling from the Strasbourg court on same-sex union. So actually, it is already a legal requirement for every Council of Europe country to have a legal provision for same sex-couples, based on various other rulings over the past 10 years or so. There is no consensus that marriage has to be provided to same-sex couples by this court. But civil unions do have to be a legal option. So yeah, this ruling last week may not be breaking much new ground, but it certainly ups the pressure on the Romanian government to do more to protect the rights of LGBT people living in that country.
* * *
K: If you did hear last week's episode, you will know that we pride ourselves here at the Europeans in really trying to push the boundaries of the kinds of podcasts that get made about Europe. We love making the kind of episode that you're listening to now where we're a couple of friends doing our research and telling you in an entertaining way – we hope – about all the stories you might have missed from Europe that week. But we also try to make these really ambitious episodes like last week, where we get under the skin of what Europe is and how its institutions work, and explain really complicated things like climate policy in a way that feels fun and approachable. And the only reason that we can do any of this, frankly, is the amazing generosity of the listeners who chip in via Patreon.com so that we can pay our team for the many, many hours of work that go into making this podcast each week. And this week we have some new supporters to thank.
D: Yes, we have a bumper crop of people to thank for signing up on Patreon, because we didn't do any shoutouts last week. I've been doing lots of breath exercises this week as part of rehearsals for a project about breath. So let's see if I can list them all in one breath.
K: This is gonna be fun. Go for it.
D: Thank you to [LIST OF NAMES] That was actually too easy. We're gonna need more Patreon supporters in order for it to be a challenge.
K: That was so impressive! How long can you hold your breath underwater for?
D: Oh, I don't know. I don't hang out in a swimming pool all the time. Unlike you, apparently.
K: Let's try that next week – underwater Patreon shoutouts. Thank you all so, so much. If you too would like to do something very kind to round off this week, we would love it if you could send any cash you can spare our way. All amounts big and small really help us to keep this show alive. And there are various perks available to those who help us out, including membership of a really lovely Facebook group, and for the elite tier of extremely generous supporters, I think a fresh batch of our much coveted Angry Macron tote bags have just arrived at your house, haven't they Dominic?
D: They have, it's very exciting. Please sign up for the top tier and you'll get one sent to you as soon as possible.
K: All the information is at patreon.com/europeanspodcast.
INTERVIEW WITH MEGANNE CHRISTIAN - 20’53”
K: If you have been listening to this podcast for a long old time, you might remember that all the way back in 2019, we managed, through some kind of technological miracle, to ring up the French-Italian research base in Antarctica. And we got through to the physicist Meganne Christian, who was spending a year down there. Meganne, it seems. was not content with working at the end of the earth – she now has her eye on space. We were amazed at the end of last year when this wonderful former podcast guest of ours was announced as being just one of a handful of people picked by the European Space Agency as a new intake of astronauts. Meganne is in fact one of 11 reserve astronauts on the team. We were absolutely thrilled for her, obviously, and we have been dying ever since to find out more about what this role involves. So we gave her a ring this week – on land, here in France, actually – to talk about life as a reserve astronaut and what Europe is up to in space.
K: One minute, we are interviewing you from this very isolated research base In Antarctica. And then the next thing we know your name is being announced as one of 11 people picked out of more than 20,000 to train as a reserve astronaut for the European Space Agency. How did that happen?
MEGANNE: Yeah, that's true. I guess I've always been fascinated by space. But growing up in Australia, there was not a space agency until really, really recently. So I never actually thought that becoming an astronaut would be a possibility for me. It's a bit like the whole Antarctica story. Like, I went to the Antarctic Museum in New Zealand and loved it and was always fascinated by it. But I did like a completely different kind of career and didn't think that I would actually get to work there. But in the end, I did. So those things from my childhood are kind of coming back. But basically, when I was in Antarctica, the European Space Agency does experiments on us because it's like an analogue mission to Mars. In fact, it's also called, it has a nickname – White Mars – there at Concordia. So I got to know a lot more about this astronaut thing. And I also learned a lot about myself during that time and a lot about the things that I didn't think I was capable of, but I actually was. So when I heard that ESA would be recruiting astronauts for the first time since 2008, I said, ‘Yes, absolutely. That is definitely something I'm going to do.’
D:And you made it. What does it mean, actually, to be a reserve astronaut?
M: So they selected 17 people from 23,000. Five of those people are what's called ‘career astronauts’. Because basically, the ESA model is a bit different to the NASA model. So the NASA recruits people more often; they recruit a lot more people, basically, because they have more flights available, but they train everybody. And maybe not everybody gets through the training, maybe not everybody gets a flight. But the European Space Agency wants to keep up its record of, everybody who trains then goes to space. So they have five flights available at the moment, and so they're training five people. There's one para-astronaut who's going to be an astronaut with a disability. So they're doing a feasibility study to see whether people with disabilities, in this case a particular disability, can go to space and what that would involve. And then there are 11 of us who are members of the astronaut reserve. What that means is that we continue with our normal jobs, but we basically act as ambassadors for space. We do some briefings every year, we have to keep up our medical certification, basically just waiting for our opportunity, which might be from a government funding a special mission. Or it might be that the European Space Agency and its member states decide to expand the astronaut corps. Or if for some reason one of the career astronauts can't continue, then we can step in.
K: And what kind of mission might that be? Would it definitely involve going to space in some capacity? Or could it be something completely different from what we normally think of as astronaut work?
M: Well, there are a lot of things going on that we could be called to do, kind of adjacent astronaut training. We wouldn't be doing astronaut training unless we're assigned a space mission, but there are certainly things that we could be called to do, like analogue missions and doing parabolic flights and things like that. But eventually a mission would most likely be to the International Space Station at this point. Although after 2030, the International Space Station is not going to be around anymore, it's going to be deorbited. And at that point, there will be commercial space stations. And so instead of ISS, it might be a commercial station. And then after the ISS, there's also the lunar mission. So you've probably heard about Artemis – we're going back to the moon, and we're going back to stay.
D: Is going into space something that you've always wanted to do? Like, how – what percentage of you is excited about the prospect of going to space? What percentage of you thinks ‘This is terrifying, I shouldn't do this’?
M: I’m 150% excited about it. I mean, I just can't find that fear in myself of going there. So no, it's all excitement.
K: We talked on the show a few weeks back about Europe's Juice space mission, which is going to explore the icy moons [of Jupiter], it’s very exciting. And you've mentioned going to the moon as well. But it does feel like we hear less about what Europe is generally up to in space than we do about NASA. What are the projects that the ESA is involved in, in general, that you're particularly excited about?
M: That's a really good point. We're at kind of a critical moment for space, because the commercial side is really growing. At the same time, there's kind of a new space race between the US and China, preparing for a future on Mars as well. A lot of these things are done in collaboration between countries. So ESA is certainly involved in all of these in terms of collaboration. And it has some of its own missions for sure, like Juice as well, which is a really exciting one. And it has a really strong role in the Artemis programme, because it has the European Service Module, which is actually the module which is going to keep astronauts alive as they go to the moon. And it's what powers that module getting to the moon as well. So it plays a really strong role, but it is mainly collaboration. And we're kind of moving over from collaboration to cooperation and even competition with this rise of commercial space, ‘the new space’ as it's called. So yeah, it's a really critical time and ESA actually got together this high level advisory group to talk about how Europe should be going in terms of human and robotic space exploration. And they've said some really hard hitting things.
D: I was reading recently about there being some anxiety about our ability to launch rockets and satellites independently of the US. And we had to use Elon Musk's company SpaceX for some recent launches. What's going on there? And how is the ESA trying to fix it?
M: Yeah, this is really a lot of what that high level advisory group was talking about. So we rely on other countries to launch astronauts, and many times also cargo. So Europe has a spaceport in French Guiana and launches Ariane rockets from there. And it's been hugely successful – for example, the James Webb Space Telescope, it had a really, really successful launch there. In fact, the mission should, will probably be extended for 10 years because of how efficient that launch was. But there's only one more mission of Ariane 5, and Ariane 6 is not ready, it's supposed to be launched towards the end of this year. But that gives us kind of a period in which we don't really have our independent access to space. And we've never had any independent access to space for astronauts. So this is where Europe is really going to need to step up. It's important because there have been predictions that the space industry is going to grow to about a trillion euros by 2040. If we don't have our own independent access to space, we're not going to get a share of that. It's also about soft power, right? Because if you have launch capabilities, then you can share that with others in a kind of diplomacy way. So a really, really important thing to have. And so the report of the high level advisory group is called Revolution Space, and it's trying to get Europe to step up. But it's difficult because the European Space Agency, of course, is made up of member states and they all have to agree.
K: We've also been reading this week about this study from the European Space Agency where they are paying 12 volunteers to lie in bed for 60 days. What is going on? I know Dominic was thinking of volunteering.
D: Seriously considering.
M: Yeah, it's one of the many kinds of analogue studies that they do, because it simulates what happens to your body when you're in space. Because when you're in microgravity for a long period of time, you're not using your muscles very much. The best way of studying what could happen over a long period of time would be to not use your muscles very much here on Earth without having to pay to go into space. That's a bed rest study, and it's really quite amazing what they do. They're not even allowed to get out of bed to go to the loo, for example. They always have to have one shoulder on the bed. I mean, it sounds like it would be great, but then when you think about the details, they're pretty tough people that are doing this study.
D: Yeah, maybe it's not for me actually. One other thing that I think people don't realise that the space agency is doing so much about is climate change. Can you tell us a bit more about what the agency is doing in this area?
M: Yes, space research and space applications are hugely important for climate change, particularly Earth observations. So there are a lot of satellites that we have that are observing the Earth. And that means things like glacier movements and sea level rise, and also disaster management, like what happens when you have flooding, what happens when you have bushfires. Basically, all these satellites are giving information into worldwide databases that everybody can access and do climate modelling, work out what's going on. If we didn't have these observations from the satellites, we would really know a lot less about what's going on with the climate. They go hand-in-hand with the measurements that we do in places like Antarctica. It's hugely important and they give information that feeds into making decisions on how to build a city for example, or where and when to plant crops.
K: I hope you don't mind but I took the liberty of reading your official European Space Agency biography, and it mentions all of your academic achievements, and the fact that you're in the astronaut reserve of course, but also that you, you know, casually speak Japanese, you have a black belt in a Korean martial art, you enjoy sewing, and you sing in multiple choirs. Do you sleep?
M: I love sleeping. I probably wouldn't do these long studies of staying in bed. But no, I do sleep. A lot of these things that I do to relax, right? I love knitting and sewing and crocheting. And that's what I do to kind of wind down at the end of the day. And on weekends I'll go out hiking or doing a via ferrata or a long cycle, and it's what makes me happy.
K: Thank you so much to Meganne for joining us. I love that this podcast has an astronaut friend. In the show notes you will find links to Meganne’s Twitter and Instagram pages where you can follow her work, she's there under astro_meganne. And you'll also find links to some ESA projects that you might want to check out.
ISOLATION INSPIRATION - 32’53”
K: What have you been enjoying this week?
D: Well, my isolation inspiration actually comes from the husband of this week's guest. Meganne's husband, Liam Wyatt, recommended a fascinating long-ish YouTube video that I watched today called The [Queer] Politics of Eurovision. It's from a channel called Verilybitchie, and it takes a deep dive into the complexities and ambiguities around the politicisation of Eurovision, particularly around queer issues. It's a really interesting video which touches on topics such as homo-nationalism. If you don't know what that is, then watch it, because it's quite an interesting concept. It looks very critically also at the stereotype of Western Europe being the queer-friendly side of the continent and Eastern Europe being the more homophobic culturally. And the discussion of Israel's hosting of the competition in 2019 was particularly eye-opening. It is over 40 minutes long, but the time passes very quickly because the video is really well researched, edited and presented. A lot of the research they use is actually based on a book by our favourite Eurovision academic Dean Vuletic. So go check it out, it's super interesting.
K: Nice. Can't wait to watch that.
D: What have you been enjoying?
K: I want to recommend a utterly gorgeous podcast episode that I listened to this week from This Is Love. Do you know that podcast?
D: Yes, I do. I haven't listened to it for a while though.
K: It's a really really nice show that explores love in all of its forms. And the latest episode comes from Croatia. It is about an ex-couple called Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić, and they are the co-founders of the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb. I've never actually been to the Croatian capital, but when I do, I am heading straight to the museum because it sounds fascinating. The museum hosts objects leftover from relationships that haven't worked out, alongside little signs from the people that gave them in, explaining the stories of those objects. I won't tell you any more because I don't want to spoil the episode for you, but it is a really beautiful podcast, it made me laugh, it made me cry a little bit, and I just thought it was really lovely. It is on the feed of This Is Love, wherever you get your podcasts.
D: I'm downloading it immediately.
HAPPY ENDING - 35’09”
D: For my happy ending this week I wanted to tell you about an incredible scientific breakthrough by a team of researchers in Switzerland at Lausanne University. This team inserted electronic implants into the brain and spine of a Dutchman who was paralysed in a cycling accident 12 years ago, and they reported this week that he is now able to walk again, simply by thinking about it.
K: I saw this, this is so amazing!
D: It's really amazing. It uses wireless technology inside the man's body, which really seems like science fiction to me.
K: He's like human Bluetooth.
D: Kind of. And I guess a lot of life feels like science fiction these days. But this is the exciting, the cheering science fiction, as opposed to like all that dystopian shit that we've been served up lately.
K: Yay!
D: The implant system is still experimental at this stage, so it's not ready to be rolled out but it gives a lot of hope that a treatment for people with spinal cord injuries could be on the way. So for now, Gert-Jan, the Dutchman who received this life-changing treatment is very happy. He said to the BBC: ‘It has been a long journey, but now I can stand up and have a beer with my friend. It's a pleasure that many people don't realise.’
K: Aww. Cheers to you, Gert-Jan.
* * *
K: If you would like to see a very undignified video of me doing an impromptu Eurovision remix – why wouldn't you, frankly – look no further than our Instagram page, @europeanspodcast.
D: You are a Eurovision mashup genius, and I love the choreography you did spontaneously. It was while we were recording together in Amsterdam, and fortunately I had my video on.
K: I am going to live to regret that. We're also still on Twitter, bravely hanging on even though Twitter feels a bit like a party that everyone is leaving, @europeanspod. Let's keep Twitter alive! It is a good website when it's not being terrible. And if you have ideas for things that you want to hear about on the show, or people that you would like to hear being interviewed, we love hearing from you – send us an email, hello at europeanspodcast.com.
D: This week's episode was produced by Katy Lee and Wojciech Oleksiak. Thank you both. We'll be back next week with another episode full of stories from the western-most peninsulas of Eurasia. I'm gonna make this a thing.
K: Rolls off the tongue. See you next week everyone.
D: Bye guys!
K: ¡Hasta luego!