From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.
On episode 406, International Space Station leaders Laura Shaw and Jennifer Buchli discuss the science, discoveries, and innovations that have defined nearly 25 years aboard the orbiting laboratory. This episode was recorded September 23, 2025.
Transcript
Dane Turner
Houston, We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 404. The evolution of the laboratory. I’m Dane Turner, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight and more.
We’ve recently hit a monumental milestone. Expedition 1 began on November 2, 2000, so November 2, 2025 marks 25 years of continuous human presence aboard the International Space Station. And to celebrate that, we are dedicating several upcoming episodes to covering different aspects of the ISS and how we got to where we are today.
For nearly a quarter century, the station has been a hub of scientific discovery, international partnership and technological innovation, and those discoveries and innovations are what we’re going to focus on today to tell us more about our orbiting laboratory and the science that’s been done there, we have deputy manager of the ISS vehicle office, Laura Shaw, and International Space Station Program chief scientist Jennifer Buchli. Together, we’ll hypothesize just what it is that makes the International Space Station so instrumental.
Let’s get started.
Dane Turner
Laura, Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us on Houston We Have a Podcast today. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourselves? What brought you to NASA, and how did you get to where you are today?
Laura Shaw
Yeah, hi. This is Laura. I was born a space nerd. From a very early age, I was fascinated with human space flight in particular, so I spent most of my younger years studying space history, and then went to engineering …