“We should look for life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus,” says space activist Ariel Waldman

Ariel Waldman has worked with NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, and hundreds of citizen scientists and inventors to make sure humanity gets to space. For our seventh episode of Ars Technica Live, we got her uncensored opinions about what it will really take to inhabit the Solar System. It's a lot harder and weirder than you might think.

We began by talking about how Waldman became a "space activist," which is not a job description you hear very often. While she was in design school, she fell in love with space and applied for jobs that would allow her to pursue that interest. Luckily, NASA was hiring non-scientists to work on outreach programs, and that's where her career started.

Since then, she has set up Spacehack.org, a directory of space projects that need your help, even if you're not an astronaut (or astrophysicist). And she has worked on a National Academies committee to advise the US government about how it should plan for the future of human spaceflight.

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