NASA plans to blast a crew back to the moon any day now, with Wednesday marking the earliest possible launch window.
It’s been more than 50 years since the last moon mission, and the Artemis Two crew is the most diverse to orbit the lunar surface.
When it comes to breaking barriers and records, former astronaut and current central Ohio resident Kathryn Sullivan knows a thing or two about that.
The first American woman to walk in space, she’s also the first woman to dive to the lowest point on Earth.
She joins us for this week's Tech Tuesday to talk about the evolving role of women in space, her adventures under the sea and how she’s educating a new generation of thrill seekers.
We'll also discuss the significance of the recent Meta verdict.
Guests:
- Kathryn Sullivan, first American woman to walk in space/oceanographer/author
- Russell Holly, director of commerce content, CNET
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to Tech Tuesday from All Sides with Amy Juravich, a show where we share stories about science, technology, and the future of our environment. Today, we're talking about space and the sea, but first the news that NASA plans to blast a crew back to the moon any day now, with tomorrow being the earliest possible launch window.
It's been more than 50 years since the last moon mission, and the "Artemis II" crew is the most diverse to orbit the lunar surface. When it comes to breaking barriers and records, former astronaut and current central Ohio resident Kathryn Sullivan knows a thing or two about that.
She joins us today to talk about the evolving role of women in space, her adventures under the sea, and how she's educating the next generation of thrill seekers with a new book. Welcome back to All Sides, Kathryn.
Kathryn Sullivan: Great to be with you, Amy.
Juravich: So let's start off with that recent space news. Artemis 2 is taking off maybe, probably tomorrow, I guess, weather depending. It's gonna be a 10 day mission to orbit the moon. What do you think about going back to the moon? Do we need to go back to moon? Why is it important to go to the back to to the Moon?
Sullivan: Yeah, I think it is important to go back to the moon for a couple of reasons. One is I think America is always at our best when we are reaching for something that is beyond what we know how to do, which can galvanize so many different avenues of knowledge, of technology, of human entrepreneurialism.
Also, we've been watching in the last decade or so as a whole different dynamic of space economy emerges around us, somewhat globally, but really predominantly in the United States and Europe. So I think setting that next goal, drive the next step in technology and commercial capability is a cornerstone or the turnkey, I guess, to unlocking the next level of that economic development.
And finally, there still are plenty of things scientifically that we don't yet know about the moon itself, about transiting and living and working in deep space for extended periods of time, and even about the human body and how it reacts to different environments.
On the human physiology point, part of what intrigues me is when we take the human body out of the gravity it is always normally in, what processes, what phenomena, what biological phenomena do we observe or see more clearly that they're masked by gravity on Earth, if you will? And how does that new understanding of the fundamental anatomy and physiology of human bodies help us improve clinical treatments here on Earth?
Juravich: On board this flight to the moon will be the first woman chosen for a deep space mission, Christina Cook. The crew won't land on the moon, they're just gonna circle it, but you were the first American woman to step outside of a spacecraft, October, 1984, aboard the space shuttle. So as someone who knows what it's like to be the the first to do something, what are your thoughts for Christina and what she might be experiencing or thinking right now, as she prepares for tomorrow?
Sullivan: Well, one clarification first of all, they're going to swing around the moon one time, but not orbit it.
Juravich: Okay, there's a, yes, I.
Sullivan: Yeah, it's an important difference because you're still testing the Orion capsule, and the pathway that they're going to be on around the moon means if the rockets on the Orion wouldn't behave well, they're still on a path back to the Earth. So it's a safe pathway around the Moon. Think of it as a slingshot.
Juravich: They're gonna slingshot around the moon. I got it. Yeah.
Sullivan: So about Christina and firsts, I know Christina a little bit. Interestingly, she was working for me. I was running NOAA in 2013. She was running NOAA's American Samoa Field Station. So we have this fun little tie that when she was selected, I was her boss, boss, bus.
Juravich: Oh, okay, yeah.
Sullivan: And when she and Jessica Mayer did the first all-female spacewalk, pretty sure it was Christina who, her suit was made up of a component that I had worn in 1984. So we've corresponded and kept touch on these few fun things.
But one of the things I know about her that we share is we're not aiming for and really don't care about the first labels. And in fact, she's quite clear in a number of her interviews that making a thing about. A person who's different than someone else is the first such different person to do something.
It detracts from the important message, which is the huge degree to which all of this is a team sport. Missions don't happen by single people. And the little oddity of, I snuck outside of spacecraft first, or she'll go well beyond Earth orbit first for a female. We can over-index on that and lose the larger point and the larger purpose. And it is that larger purpose that people like Christina and I are really invested in.
Juravich: Recently, we had the 40th anniversary of the 1986 "Challenger" disaster, and I know you were friends very close with a lot of those astronauts, including Judith Resnick, native of Akron. Whenever you were thinking about that being 40 years ago, you know, what came to mind whenever that anniversary passed.
Sullivan: You know, it's always a tug on the heartstrings. It was a horrible day for everyone from the whole country, but in particular for the families that were affected and those of us who were friends and close crewmates.
And everyone in the NASA program, because that was our crew and our spaceship and something the bigger collective, we clearly had best or done wrong that cost them their lives. And so, you know, that kind of what went wrong and how do we fix it is a, It's a really kind of searing time of self-examination. Technical examination, certainly, but also the people involved. What did we miss? How did we miss it? How do we make sure we never miss something like that again?
Juravich: I know that you don't wanna talk about firsts with women or that any, or like, you know, cause you wanna just focus on the mission and what's happening and what they're doing, but how would you characterize the evolution of women in space from your earliest days? I mean, what have you witnessed, I guess, since you left the space program? Is there still that separation where they're like, there's a group of women and then the men?
Sullivan: You know, I think within – largely within NASA and certainly within the astronaut corps, that distinction doesn't matter much at all. There are, Ash.
Juravich: Hopefully, it left in the 80s.
Sullivan: Well, the biology is always there. It's never going to go completely away. But there are astronauts, and each individual astronaut has skills and strengths and weaknesses like every human being. Most astronauts, certainly Christina Reed-Weissman, I know both of them a little bit, they're competing mainly with themselves.
They're not competing in a mano a mano way to take some other astronaut out of the game so that they get their Indeed. It's a little bit of a random walk for who gets which assignments when based on skills or timing or all sorts of things like that.
So, but since our day, in my day back at NASA, it was a big thing for women to be on the spacecraft at all. It was a thing for two women to be on the space craft at the same time, like my first flight in 1984, or to do a space walk. It was big thing for there to be one woman. As a front room flight controller in mission control.
So that's one of the engineers you actually see on camera when you see a view of mission control, and it took that young woman, Jenny Howard, at least two extra years to tick all the boxes and convince the men that she really knew her stuff. Fast forward, not many years after I left, women were flight controllers.
They were flight directors, meaning they're actually in charge of the whole mission. They're the Chris Krantz in a new mission. Commanding space shuttles, commanding space stations as Peggy Whitson and Christina, sorry, Sonny Williams have done. The director of the Johnson Space Center of the space that are up in Cleveland, the Lewis Space Flight Center.
So rising up the ranks in solid and substantive technical positions, not just the staff support positions. Two women have been the deputy. Administrator of NASA and two or maybe three have been the chief scientists at NASA.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking with former astronaut and central Ohio resident, Kathryn Sullivan. You hold a Guinness World Record for being the most vertical person in the world. So this title refers to spanning the greatest vertical distances. As a NASA astronaut, you walked in space.
And then in 2020, you were the first woman to dive to the ocean's deepest point. So the most, vertical. So what does that title mean to you, being the Most Vertical Person?
Sullivan: Quite like it. And I have a very reverent friend from my Houston days who's a very clever songwriter. And he noticed that, well, he went with the most vertical girl in the world and he said, gosh, that sounds a lot like that old tune, "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World." So he wrote a whole set of lyrics to that melody. Very, very fun.
You know, I'm quite tickled by it. I figured when I accepted NASA's selection as an astronaut that perhaps closed the door forever on being an oceanographer or you're learning more about the ocean other than as a scuba diver.
Juravich: You picked to go up instead of down. Yeah, it was.
Sullivan: Yeah, it was a pretty big fork in the road just after my PhD. So you kinda had to assume, if the ocean door closes completely and never opens again, are you okay with that? Was that the right choice for you? It definitely was, but I've been super delighted to find multiple ways since then to keep one hand in the water while one hand is in the star.
So the invitation to dive with Viktor Vyskova to the "Challenger Deep" was just pure curiosity. It's a part of the ocean of an environment in the ocean I'd studied and read a lot of research papers about. But there's something about seeing it yourself, I think as a human being, but certainly as a scientist. And so that opportunity, it was just not to be passed up.
Juravich: So you have many titles, astronaut, aquanaut, oceanographer, and also children's book author. So you a new book coming out in June and it's called "How to Dive to the Deepest Place on Earth." For this book, you collaborated with well-known writer and illustrator, Michael Rosen, who is also from central Ohio. "How to Dive" is chock full of information, illustrations, what do you want young readers to learn from this book? What I hope a young reader takes from this
Sullivan: in this book is, well, what I hope they feel like, is I hope that they feel they're my buddy or my partner going on one of those deep adventures. Rather than reading about what someone else did, I hope we've triggered enough of their imagination that they're picturing themselves doing that with me on that dive.
And I love the way, and this is really much to Michael's credit and creativity, we deliberately want to intermix real world photographs of events and of people. And illustrations, and again, our theory there is a picture of me doing something is a picture someone who's not you doing something.
But an illustration might, again, fire more of that imagination, say, that could be me, I could see, I could put myself there, I think I can imagine what it might feel like, and I'd like to try that.
Juravich: You also teamed up with Michael Rosen for your first children's book, "How to Walk in Space," a step-by-step with shuttle astronauts, right? So you have these two how-to guides. Tell us how these books are different. "How to Dive" compares to "How to Spacewalk." You know, they're both things very few people have done, but you're trying to inspire, right.
Sullivan: Yeah, they're animated by the same impulse of helping or letting the young reader feel like they're perched on your shoulder, they are side by side with you. You're doing the spacewalk together. We wrote that one from the perspective of my being perhaps the seasoned spacewalker and the other reader being the rookie on their first spacewalk.
So it's a little bit, you know, come on, buddy, we can do this, you got this. And we tried to get the same sort of spirit. Oh, it's a little. Little different in "How to Dive," but that's the same philosophy we're trying to build there.
And I'd love to give a shout out also to another central Ohio children's book author who I've collaborated with, Carmela Van Fleet. I worked with her, actually, on my very first children's book, "To the Stars," which is really sort of the Kathy Sullivan life story.
Juravich: Okay. Then whenever you decided to do the "How to Dive to the Deepest Place on Earth," I mean, how did you approach it? Because I think that whenever you think of children and children are like talking about like, what do you want to be when you grow up? Astronaut probably comes to mind before, you know, diving, right? So do you try to convey that in the book, where this.
Sullivan: Is a job that people have? I hope we've done that. Being that kind of a scientist, diving to these places, studying all of the things you could choose to study. So we feature in that book, not just the submersible and the physical experience of getting to go deep into the ocean, but what critters live at different depths of the ocean.
What is life? Life is everywhere in the ocean at all sorts of scales. So to try to convey that. You know, if you go upward into space, you get this grand, glorious, spectacular view, and I think that's what makes everybody draw naturally to the stars more than to the ocean.
We've all got the stars and the moon over our head. We love big, expansive, aspirational views. And the ocean has sort of always been brought to us as maybe scary, you know, something weird is living there that might nibble at your toes, and it's dark. So it's a little more of a, it takes a little bit more, I think, of a draw to. Create that enticement about the ocean. And I think that comes through all the life in the ocean.
Juravich: Coming up, we're going to continue our conversation with Kathryn Sullivan. She's staying with us. We're going talk about the future of space exploration and the future exploration of the ocean floor. That's when Tech Tuesday from All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides with Amy Juravich, a show where we share stories about science, technology, and the future of our environment. Today we're talking with former astronaut and current central Ohio resident Kathryn Sullivan. She holds many titles, astronaut, aquanaut, oceanographer, and children's book author.
Her new children's books comes out this June and is called "How to Dive to the Deepest Place on Earth." Thanks again for being with us today, Kathryn. Always fun to be with you Amy I wanted to talk about some of the billionaires, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, entering the space industry, a new sort of commercial space race has begun. What are your thoughts of the privatizing of space exploration?
Sullivan: Think there's definitely a role for that, and it's certainly transforming the overall capability of humankind to get to space. I mean, what SpaceX has done in the last 15-ish or so years is reduce the price of taking anything to orbit by more than a factor of 10. So what that means is possible now, who can go now, just opens up tremendously.
It's now feasible for college classes, undergraduate classes. To get the experience of designing and producing a small satellite and actually getting it to orbit.
Juravich: Wow. Okay. Yeah. So
Sullivan: Learn those lessons early. Be able to start developing those muscles when you're an undergraduate. What does it take to get something into space and make it work? I'm perfectly fine with people having the opportunity if they have the means to get that experience, especially of the force it takes to get somebody off the earth and the view.
It is transformative. I think even the 10 or 12 minute view that you get on the short tourist rides is still a life altering experience. More power to you, I mean, that's just perfectly fine with me.
On the other side of things, and we've seen something similar in the ocean arena actually, there are some well-to-do individuals, high net worth, not just transforming the means, the rocket ships of getting there, but also beginning to invest in the scientific investigations.
So Eric Schmidt has just recently made a very substantial commitment out of his philanthropic wealth to space sciences to help propel the research. That advances our understanding of human physiology, of the space environment, of the stars. It's just a different pattern for private capability to complement the public investment in knowledge and understanding.
Juravich: And speaking of that public investment, the Trump administration recently cut NASA's budget by more than $6 billion. What effects will this lack of federal funding, this reduction in federal funding have? I mean, is the private money gonna step up, or does this have lasting impacts when the federal government doesn't invest?
Sullivan: Well, the Trump administration proposed that, but I think if you look at what the Congress has actually appropriated, Congress moved very far back in the other direction. So there's —
Juravich: Congress snuck some money back in there, yeah. Yeah, well, Congress. There, yeah.
Sullivan: Yeah, well, Congress decides the final budget, the President makes a proposal. So the final cut, as I recall from the actual appropriations, is not as severe. And then there was another infusion, like a $10 billion infusion back into NASA from the one big, beautiful bill, which is the capital that's helping re-phase and re-plan the missions after "Artemis 2" and the overall plan to not only go back to the the capability to live and work there at scale.
Juravich: Okay, so it's not as bad as some of the headlines make it seem, right? No, yeah.
Sullivan: No, yeah, the headlines tend to index strongly on what the President proposed, forgetting that there's a lot of discussion and negotiation that happens after that.
Juravich: Stated goals of the aforementioned billionaires is to get humans to Mars. Do you think that's possible? Do you see that happening in your lifetime, in my lifetime, or my kids' lifetime? I
Sullivan: it's already technically possible to get human beings to Mars. It would be a stretch beyond what we've done for quite some time, but we know how to do that kind of rocketry. We know how to land things on Mars. The big challenges there and the big risks there would be to human health, would be the radiation environment and the long duration in microgravity.
So I think that's the risk equation that NASA is certainly thinking about. Do I want to buy that down by further research by sort of building step-by-step, so that when I finally commit human beings, NASA human beings to go to Mars, we all know what they're in for, although I want to just say let's try it now and see what happens.
The U.S. And NASA philosophy would be more towards set some building blocks so we're not asking astronauts to take quite that big a risk. But could we get them there? Yes. It would be a sortie mission, get there and do some stuff and come back, because And we don't yet have the capability to bring enough mass and equipment up to Mars to stay for a long time. Maybe the moon first, it'll stay on the moon. That's right.
Juravich: China is also ramping up its space program. It's even predicted to surpass the United States in the next few years. Are we in another space race with the US and China?
Sullivan: You know, many people are casting it as a space race, and certainly the Chinese national policy and science policy, their most recent 15-year plan. It's very, pardon me, their goals are very lofty. That's very clear, and they're very intent on meeting them.
And there is definitely a thread in their policy statements about regaining hegemony, having their place on the world stage. I think the big question is, is it worth? Is the right driver for the United States to see it again as a race? Or is the better driving force for the United States now to think about durability on the moon?
I mean, do we wanna race there once, make two more boot prints, plant a flag and say hooray we won? Or do we want to really start to establish a presence on the Moon for the long term that's about going on out to the solar system and beyond? Probably both.
Juravich: Americans like to win, right? Related to that kind of is also we're on the ground here on Earth in an AI race, you know, AI infrastructure. Hundreds of billions are expected to be spent on AI this year. Do you see AI changing space travel in the coming years? I mean, it's changing everything.
Sullivan: Yeah, I'm sure we'll see increasing use of AI agents to help make sense of a lot of information and deliver a synthesized answer. I think about how we worked with mission control in Houston during the shuttle era. The controllers on the ground could see many, many more data bits than we could see because of the instrument.
Juravich: The lack of internet. Yeah, a little bit of that.
Sullivan: But also just the display space we had aboard, we had to really prioritize that. So imagine if you could have an AI-enabled spacecraft that could be watching all the same things a mission control center was watching and delivering maybe both to the ground controller and to the crew, like here's the situation, a situational assessment really quickly.
Offloading some of that cognitive burden from the flight controllers and the astronauts could be a great big boon to things. The slippery slope I wanna watch out for is cognitive offloading. Like free up some of my brain space to do deeper, better work.
That's great, but cognitive surrender, like imagining I'm not doing the thinking, I'm actually doing the challenge of writing something coherent or doing the code. I think I would like to keep humans in the loop on the creative, deep cognitive side.
Juravich: Hmm, yes. So until the robots take over, right? Yeah, I know. We've all seen that movie. Okay. This is Tech Tuesday from All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking with former astronaut and current central Ohio resident Kathryn Sullivan. I wanted to pivot back to your more recent work with diving deep into the ocean.
We recently had Neil deGrasse Tyson on the show, and he said that we know more about space than we know about the deepest oceans on our own planet. Do you agree with that?
Sullivan: Think Neil's right on that. We certainly have better topographic maps of the surface of the moon and even the surface of Mars than we have of the bottom of the seafloor. That's partly an artifact of how much easier it is to make that kind of measurement from a spacecraft than it is from an ocean ship.
So that's just time and space limitation. But the other thing is the ocean is absolutely teeming with life. And right now our knowledge about what critters live in the ocean and where are they distributed boils down to, we know who we've bumped into.
Juravich: Oh, okay. Okay? Yeah, yeah.
Sullivan: Which mainly means larger critters for starters and the greater abundance of life in the ocean is much, much smaller plankton and microbes. So there's a new technology that we just did some work with on an expedition I was on in the Antarctic called eDNA, that stands for environmental DNA.
Juravich: Okay.
Sullivan: The way it works is you pump some water, let's say some Antarctic ocean water, through a pump and into a filter disk that's about five inches diameter. You let that filter disk dry out and you take it to a lab and you sample and you sequence all the DNA that you find on that disk. And that basically tells you, it gives you the full census of everybody and anybody who has been in and around that bit of water.
Juravich: Oh.
Sullivan: Because we're all shedding bits of hair or skin as we walk around. So you're getting that dispersed sample of DNA of sort of everyone who passed through the neighborhood recently, and not just the people you happen to bump into.
Juravich: You went to the "Challenger Deep," which is located, it's the deepest part of the ocean, more than 30,000 feet deep, and you traveled to the "Challenger Deep" in a submersible. Can you tell us the difference between a submercible and a submarine? Yeah.
Sullivan: The two key things to think about are how deep can you go, and are you mainly moving vertically or horizontally. So a submarine, typically, say military submarines largely, are going to work in the upper 1,000 feet of the ocean.
And because of the missions that they're designed for, they need to be able to move laterally, cover large distances, move miles or thousands of miles, stay submerged for a long time. But they don't have to withstand the really immense crushing pressures of the deepest part of the ocean.
And since they want to be able to move at pretty good speed, north, south, east, and west, a cylinder is the better shape, right? More people, longer time, all that good stuff. Submersibles are, well, smartly designed submersibles are always designed as spheres. Except for the notorious one that decided he could be a cylinder.
Speaker 5: Um, okay. Yeah.
Sullivan: If you're going to go very deep, below about 3,000 feet anyway, sphere is the proper shape. It equalizes all the forces. It withstands them best. So it's smaller. It's probably two to three people max. And it's mainly designed to go vertically. Once you're at your location on the bottom, however deep, you may move a mile or two in some direction or another. So, It's built for close observation in the deep sea, not for. Transiting large distances.
Juravich: This idea of going so deep into the ocean, I mean, you mentioned earlier that you a long time ago had to make a choice between the stars and the water. Did you always want to dive deep? Is that like, I mean you'd pick the stars first, but now you got this opportunity. Is that something you always wanted to do?
Sullivan: Really is. My specialty in oceanography was seafloor geology. And so, you know, as a geologist, you can take all the seismic images and bathymetric measurements you want and sort of kind of build a mental picture of what is this landscape like and what are these geological landforms like?
How did this form? How is it shaped? Those are the kind of questions a geologists is asking, but nothing beats getting there and actually seeing. Much closer at hand, the shape, the form, the structures of the landscape.
So the two environments that interested me most are the mid-ocean rifts where tectonic plates are splitting apart. And other side of the scale, these deep ocean trenches where two tectonics plates are colliding and one is getting shoved under the other, which creates a dip, a trench along that seam.
And that's what the Marianas Trench is. And it's very long, the whole Mariana's Trench is probably 1,500 miles long or thereabouts. There's one little segment of it at the furthest southwest end. That's where it's been sort of pulled down deepest as these plates collide, and that's known as the "Challenger Deep." Wow. 36,000 feet, basically.
Juravich: So 36,000 feet. I mean, you were talking about a submarine going just 1,000, maybe 3,000 right, right? So 36 thousand, that is way more.
Sullivan: Yeah. So when you go 33 feet down in the ocean, the pressure you're feeling is another atmosphere.
Juravich: Wait, just 33 feet?
Sullivan: Every 10 meters, which is about 33 feet, it's another atmosphere, like the weight of the whole atmosphere, another one.
Juravich: Wow.
Sullivan: So at a thousand feet, that's 100 atmospheres. At 11,000 meters, which is the "Challenger Deep," it's 1,100 atmospheres. It's like 16,000 pounds per square inch.
Juravich: We've all heard of NASA and they're building all the stuff to go to space who who is building the stuff To go to the "Challenger Deep" was there is there a name? I don't know
Sullivan: Many people have hoped that NOAA, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, would become in a very fulsome way the ocean equivalent of NASA. But it's always had a narrower and more economically and practically oriented niche.
So it's about charting the seafloor for navigation. It's about managing ocean fisheries. It's forecasting severe weather, hurricanes and things like that. So. Really where the natural environment intersects with human life and the planet, that's really what NOAA focuses on. A nice little deep ocean exploration program, but not of the scale of missions to Mars. Right, right. Okay.
Juravich: Okay, so, so Noah has more of a broader mission, as a, okay, yeah, they would need to, like, segment that off.
Sullivan: The U.S. Navy for a while had a deep submergence mission with one vehicle that could take humans quite deep, and they walked away from that mission quite some time ago. It just wasn't germane enough to their primary military activity.
Juravich: After you completed the journey to "Challenger Deep," you held a pennant up, and there's a picture of it in your book, for the Society of Women Geographers, is that right? Tell us this history of the group and why you got a picture with that pennant.
Sullivan: Yeah, it's kind of a fun backstory. A lot of people have heard the name the Explorers Club of New York, which goes back to Sir Edmund Hillary and Robert Peary, very early explorers, and was always, until the latter 80s, only male.
But on many of those renowned expeditions that earned the man his membership in the explorers club, there were women on many of those doing real work, not just tagging along. And they also wanted a place where they could gather and share their lessons and their stories, but they weren't allowed in the Boys Club.
So some of them banded together and said, well, we need one. And they established the Society of Women Geographers. So in 1981, actually, then president of the Explorers Club mounted a campaign to actually admit women for the first time to the Exploreers Club. And he invited me and my fellow female astronaut colleagues to. Submit applications.
I gamely did, because I've sort of, Explorer has been my life's goal and life's work. But I had read about SWG, and so I called them up as well and said, hey, I've been invited to join the Explorer's Club. And I think the first women to join the Explorer Club should have been SWG members first.
Interestingly, I had earned a PhD and gotten into the astronaut court, but done nothing else yet at that point. Explorer's Club was, you're in, that's fine. SWG actually said, well, what have you actually done that you weren't a member?
Juravich: Oh, OK. OK. So are you are you still a member of the club like right now as we speak? Yeah. OK, well, I before we end, I wanted to. So what what year was the "Challenger Deep" again? Did you? Twenty twenty. Twenty twenty, OK?
But more recently, you've been traveling to the Antarctic. That's what you've been talking about. So is that you you just got back from there. You were explaining a little bit about the DNA. Is that is that what's next for you? Or was that like what's the next in your explorer?
Sullivan: Well, exploring is always next for me. I think, I hope will never end. That was a lecture gig in the Antarctic, bringing some space expertise and insight to guests and residents on one of the ships that cruises through there. My next exploration is back to a place I've been briefly twice, the Azores.
Juravich: I don't know what that is.
Sullivan: Portuguese islands just 600 miles or so off the shore of Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean. They're absolutely gorgeous. Fascinating history. I've had two very brief visits there and was entranced with them. So I've just gathered a group of friends and family and we're going to go hop on a ship and explore the islands for a couple of days.
Juravich: As well as well
Sullivan: Well, as this one does. As that one does, not this one.
Juravich: All right, so that's what's next for you?
Sullivan: That's my very next one.
Juravich: Okay, do you hope to go back to the ocean? Do you hope to go to the Antarctic or anything?
Sullivan: You know, I've always been drawn to high latitudes, the Arctic and the Antarctic for various reasons. So I'll never say never on maybe having a chance to get back there again.
I'm kind of at the point now where it's a nostalgia phase, I suppose. There are places I've lived or places where I still have long-time friends. I'd just as soon go back and re-deepen and spend some time there. There's not any place on the world, on the earth I haven't seen that's on a bucket list Oh, I really have to get therapy.
Juravich: You're one of the few that has no more left on your bucket list. That's amazing. We have been talking about space and ocean exploration with astronaut, octonaut, oceanographer, and children's book author, Kathryn Sullivan. Her new children's book that comes out in June is called "How to Dive to the Deepest Place on Earth." Kathryn, thank you so much for joining us today.
Sullivan: Always a pleasure, Amy.
Juravich: And coming up, we're going to talk about the recent jury verdict in the Meta trial and what it means for the future of social media. That's when Tech Tuesday from All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides with Amy Juravich, a show where we share stories about science, technology and the future of our environment. We've all heard stories about how damaging social media can be to children's minds.
On March 25th, a California jury ended up acting on that idea, ruling in favor of a young woman whose anxiety and depression have been attributed to the harmful, addictive aspects of apps like Instagram and YouTube. It's a rare occasion for large companies like Google and Meta to be held accountable for their apps repercussions, and it could set an interesting precedent for the future.
Joining us to discuss is Russell Holly, Director of Commerce Content for CNET. Welcome back to All Sides, Russell.
Russell Holly: Thank you.
Juravich: So what was the initial incident that led to this woman suing these companies? I mean, her case, I know there's a lot of cases out there. A lot of people have. Said that these apps are addictive. But this woman's case actually made its trial and has made national news. Do you know how it all started?
Holly: Yeah, so over the course of the last week, we've actually had two different cases that have ended poorly for Meta. The one that you're referring to in California was against Meta and YouTube together, both against the same core issue, that the algorithms that are built on these platforms are specifically designed to keep people using it as much as possible to keep people to interact as much as possible and, you know.
It has very little to do with the quality of the information being shared, the accuracy of the information being share. Nothing that you see there is part of how someone goes through daily life. And so it is with these in mind that this court case, specifically in California, was brought with the understanding. That continued use of Instagram and YouTube had a direct relationship to the decline in this one person's mental health over the course of years.
Juravich: And so that's the California case and then you also referred to there was a case out of New Mexico which was ruling something different. That verdict relates more to the content right.
Holly: That's exactly right. The New Mexico case is based on the same general premises that Meta's content and the way that it polices its content is harmful to children's mental health. This is on a much broader scale in what is considered a violation of what the state has dubbed the Unfair Practices Act. Which has accusations that the company hid that it knew about the dangers of child sexual exploitation on its platforms and its impact on children's mental health.
Juravich: Back to the California case, do you think this ruling actually kind of says that the harmful addictiveness of these social media apps was intentional? Do you think, did the ruling kind of say that it was intentionally done by the companies?
Holly: I think that there's two different statements being made here. The first is that there is, according to this jury, an undeniable link. It was a 10 to 2 ruling in favor of the plaintiff here that there was a genuine link between Meta and YouTube failing to accurately police its algorithms that led to the mental harm of this particular individual.
Juravich: Do you think, like, why would meta and YouTube let their social media influence get so out of hand? I mean, do you, I guess I answer my own question by saying money, right?
Holly: I mean the purpose of both of these organizations is to gather up things that other people have made and put advertising behind them. That is the the core of a social media company, that is how those organizations make, you know, not just some of their money but very nearly all of it is by taking things that others people have made and putting ads behind it and sharing some of that ad revenue with some of the people who make those things and share on those platforms.
Juravich: I read that the company's lawyers in the California trial were trying to blame the victim in this case. They were saying that she had family issues, issues with her mother, was in therapy. It was not the fault of the apps. Do you feel like this victim blaming backfired on them?
Holly: It absolutely did. I think that we exist in a time here in 2026 where it is sort of generally known that these social media platforms are not great for you. You know, there's always this kind of underlying, you know, it's become almost a societal joke that, you know that you're doom scrolling as a concept.
You know that. That as a joke is born out of the algorithm continuing to serve things that keep you either angry or distracted or something like that with no real effort to make sure that that information is accurate or helpful or age appropriate in some cases.
Juravich: The financial compensation that the victim will receive won't leave a scratch to Meta and YouTube's finances. The jury awarded $4.2 million in damages from Meta, 1.8 million from co-defendant YouTube. The bigger question is not the money, but the bellwether decision that could be a precedent for thousands of similar trials against social media companies. So what do you make of the money versus the precedent?
Holly: We are so very far from the end of this story. This is gonna be something that now that this has ruled against Meta in two different cases, and YouTube in one, these are gonna be cases that we will hear more about, you know, likely over the years.
We know that this particular California court case is something that is going to see. An appeal and that appeal process is likely going to be quite lengthy and include additional discovery on both parts in order to make those decisions. It is not entirely ruled out based on some of the legal expertise that I've been going through that this is a case that eventually makes its way to the Supreme Court.
You know all of this comes from the presentation of Meta as an organization doing everything that it can to ensure that it is, one, following the law in every state, and two, not having direct responsibility for someone's mental wellbeing by using their platforms.
And both of those are things that are going to become increasingly tricky for Meta in particular over the next couple of years, especially because Meta is not just Facebook, it's not just Instagram, it's just threads. You know, it is also a chat platform, you know, that exists on a global scale.
And with these court hearings happening here in the states, going the way that they have been going, it also opens the door in many cases to international lawsuits. There have been several groups in Europe who saw this as an incredibly positive step towards their own actions that may be taken against the platform in the future.
It is very likely that this is something that we will be hearing about for quite some time. And with that is going to come the spin that Meta is so very, very good at when it comes to these sort of things by rolling out kind of milk toast features that allow them to say, look at these steps that we're taking in order to make things safer for kids without actually making changes to the core algorithm itself.
Juravich: We've talked about those milquetoast features before with you on this show, but I just found it funny. My husband and I last night were watching a show on Hulu, and in between, for each break, because I don't pay enough to have no ads on my Hulu anyway, so in each commercial break of the show, there was an ad for Instagram parental controls.
And I don't t know if I was seeing that because I had worked on the show or what, or if that was just a coincidence, but... It was, I just, it struck me as funny that they just had this lawsuit and now I'm seeing in each commercial break an ad to remind me that if I give my kid Instagram, I can have control over it. What do you make of that?
Holly: Those same ads have actually been all over podcast feeds for the last month. You know, the meta is clearly prepared to spend quite a bit of money to kind of do some of this exposure so that they could come to court hearings like this and say, look at the work that we've been doing.
Included in the original reporting from "The Guardian" on this case was also the way in which Meta's lawyers were constantly communicating with journalists outside of the court case for every single step of the legal process, as long as it seemed like it was happening in their favor, which is something that "The Guardian" reporters noted on more than one occasion was not only unusual, but left out an enormous amount of detail, hoping that some of the kind of maybe less scrupulous folks on the other side of the door were going to just repeat what Meta's lawyers were saying without verification.
Juravich: Is it unusual that Meta and YouTube got paired together here? I mean, you can see, I guess it's very similar with similar cases, but when you see future lawsuits coming through, do you think they'll always be paired together or can you just sue Meta, just sue YouTube?
Holly: I suspect that we will see more pointing at Meta and fewer cases where Meta and YouTube will be grouped together. That's not to say that there will be zero. YouTube's algorithm is regularly under scrutiny for the way in which it chooses which information to share with kids.
YouTube is also a platform that has a kid mode that is regularly shown to not do enough to keep inappropriate content away from kids under 18. You know, there is, these reports come out every couple of months and it genuinely didn't seem like there was a terrible amount of momentum for restricting them until these two court cases went the way that they went.
Juravich: The jury, just as a final question, the jury did not technically rule that Meta must alter their social media practices. But do you see any changes being made besides this ad campaign that we're seeing about Instagram?
Holly: I suspect that the ad campaign will continue and there will likely be some updates made quite publicly about the changes made to things like parental controls and ways to kind of encourage that.
That level of responsibility for, you know, because personal responsibility is the big message for all of this from Meta's perspective is that it's the responsibility of the user to know what the dangers and pitfalls are despite those dangers and Pitfalls never having been actually communicated to the person using it.
And so with that, it's gonna come that back and forth. That's unlikely that any of the kind of lower level courts are going to say you must, you know, make changes to your algorithm. I suspect that those are the kind of changes we will see as this starts to reach appeals courts and higher.
Juravich: We've been talking about the landmark verdicts against Meta and YouTube related to addiction to social media apps. And we're talking with Russell Holly, Director of Commerce Content at CNET. I wanted to pivot to one topic before we end from CNET, we have a few minutes left. You may want to reconsider whether or not you purchase a wifi router in the near future.
The Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, has recently banned the sale of all foreign-made routers, which is nearly everyone on the market. So does this decision apply to routers already being sold in the US, or is this a future decision?
Holly: What will happen, you know, if you already own a router that is on this ban list, then there is a certain period of time in which the FCC is allowing the manufacturers to produce software updates that can verifiably demonstrate that they are meeting these new standards.
These new standards are a little bit on the nebulous side, so it's not clear even to us after a couple days of looking through some of these details, you, know, about what makes. You know, kind of the perfect Wi-Fi router on behalf of the FCC right now, aside from, you know, having been manufactured exclusively in the United States.
You know this, it's important to point out that this catches U.S. Companies that make their routers in other places. Netgear is a really great example. Netgears makes a ton of great routers, but they have parts that come from Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, and I think a couple of others.
There are very few companies that are 100% US made, manufactured, and the ones that are quite frankly in our testing haven't met the rate in which we would recommend them to purchase. So it's a really odd time that I think is gonna take a little while to really allow some of these companies to adapt their supply chains to meet this moment.
Juravich: Yeah, I was going to ask if there's any American-made routers completely, but I guess you're saying that the best ones are going to need to make parts, they're going to change the way they do things, right?
Holly: Yeah, I mean, one of the exceptions is Elon Musk's "Starlink," which claims that its newest routers are made entirely in Texas. But that is not something that's been independently verified, you know, so I think it's going to take some time to really understand, you know.
What the kind of dimensions of this are and which routers are going to be the ones that are going to be most useful. I suspect that the shelves that you're local Best Buy are going to look very different for the next little while. And so if you already have a router and it is behaving for you, it's probably a good idea to keep it and wait a couple of months before you go to upgrade before some of this gets worked out.
Juravich: And we have a minute left. What security risks does the FCC believe these foreign routers pose? Have they explained that? What's wrong here?
Holly: There's a couple of different things. There was, last year, there was a specific ban on one manufacturer, which was TP-Link. It was believed that TP-link was installing firmware-based backdoors in its routers in order to allow people who had the appropriate level of access to go in and take a look at your network.
It was believe. You know, in the initial ban of those routers, that that had something to do with foreign actors being able to access data on U.S. Soil. That was part of the explanation for why this ban was happening on a broader scale, but it's still not immediately clear what the final judgment was for this ban.
Juravich: All right, well, we'll stand by on the future of the router. We've been talking with Russell Holly, Director of Commerce, Content at CNET. Thanks so much for your time today, Russell.
Holly: Thanks for having me.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides. On 89.7 NPR News, I'm Amy Juravich.