Listen to the First Episode of TIME’s Space Podcast It’s Your Universe

Space is humanity’s great fever dream. It’s a place that’s unfathomably beautiful, yet lethally dangerous, a place that’s been beckoning us to visit for millions of years but that we have only recently begun to touch.

I fell for the cosmos early—when I was three years old, standing on the lawn with my parents, looking up at the sky for Sputnik, the first satellite. The idea that space was right there, and yet so remote; that the stars were so tiny, yet so huge; and that a machine that had been built by human beings on the safe and familiar Earth was now moving through that huge and hallucinatory void left me in a state of pre-K rapture.

It’s the reason I’ve spent my career covering space—mostly through my stories for TIME, as well as through my books, including Apollo 13, which was the basis for the later movie . Now I want to explore space in a different way, with my new podcast, It’s Your Universe. Each week we’ll visit a different part of the cosmic wonderland: galaxies and nebulae, black holes and wormholes, stars and quarks and comets and asteroids—and the unknown forms of life that might be part of it all.

Please join me for season one, as we begin the weekly journey with our solar system—the planets and the dwarf planets and the marble bag of colorful moons that make up our sun’s family. In later episodes we’ll range further—much further—still. Subscribe on iTunes, and let’s begin the adventure.