About the show
Space is the subject.
Alberta is the lens.
Albertans in Space is a Calgary-made video podcast about the people, projects and ideas connecting this province to humanity's future in space.
Why it exists
Space feels far away. It isn't.
For most people, space happens somewhere else. Launch pads are in Florida. Mission control is in Houston. The people doing the work seem to belong to another world.
Then you look around. There are people in Alberta building satellites, studying planetary geology, starting space companies, flying rockets and thinking hard about what we owe each other when we leave Earth. Alberta has already produced people who have left the planet.
There are bigger space podcasts and more technical ones. This one starts with a person from here and asks how they got there, what they're working on and why it matters. Sometimes the guest is an astronaut. Sometimes it's a student, a geologist, a founder or a humanities professor. The job title changes. The curiosity doesn't.
You don't need to be a space person to start. Curiosity is enough.
01The people at the table
Zac Trolley
Co-host
A Calgary project engineer in oil and gas whose fascination with space and rovers led him into engineering. He was a Mars One finalist, completed the International Space University's nine-week program and spent two weeks on a simulated Mars mission at the Mars Desert Research Station in 2018. He has talked to schools, teachers and Alberta's energy industry about space resources, and founded a space resource company in Calgary.
Meghan Westelmajer
Co-host and producer
Decades in TV and film production. She produced the video for Zac's Mars One application, pointed out that 2024 was supposed to be the year Mars One landed, and brought the idea for this show to his kitchen table.
Sandra Lynn Trent
Production
Production assistant with a background in TV and film.
More than rockets
Space touches almost everything.
Engineering, geology, medicine and agriculture. Law, history, ethics and art. Alberta spent generations solving hard problems in cold, distant, isolated places. Those skills travel.
Space is closer than you think
The satellite down the road, the researcher at your university, the company ten minutes from somewhere you already know.
Space is a human story
Technology gets us there. People decide what happens next. Science sits beside culture, ethics and Indigenous knowledge here.
Wonder and work can coexist
For some of us space is wonder. For others it's becoming a job site. Both belong in the conversation.
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