How it all began
Continuing in my project to republish all of my favorite now.space stories, I turn to the beginning. The reason I started working for the website was because the old director at my journalism program, Rob Irion, sent me an email saying that he'd be contacted by an editor for a new space news outlet and would I be interested in writing for it. At almost exactly the same time, my friend Max told me that his friend Heather just got a job as a space new editor and she was looking for writers. I took it as a sign.
I met Heather in person for beers in SF and we hit it off. I pitched her a couple of early stories, including the one below about the problem of dust on the moon and Mars. Turns out it's not the most original ideas, and you can find plenty of other news stories covering roughly the same ground that I did. But I had a lot of fun reporting it, probably talking to far more sources than necessary for what was supposed to be a 600-ish word piece. The anecdotes about Apollo astronauts dealing with moon dust were the best part—apparently Apollo 12 astronauts got naked in their capsule in an effort to get off all the dust they'd tracked back inside with them. Good stuff.