By Sheeva Azma
The other day, I saw a media advisory on the internet asking for volunteer journalists to interview NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, who is launching to the International Space Station with Expedition 73 in mid-April 2025.
So, of course, I immediately filled out the form.
It asked me what media organization I was in, and I just wrote “freelance,” since I am a freelance journalist. Sometimes, freelancers don’t have the same media access privileges that staff journalists do, so I didn’t think too much about my desire to speak to astronauts after that. What I did not know is that for NASA, freelance journalists are afforded the same media access privileges as staff journalists!
So, when NASA reached out to me asking for more information to be able to talk to Kim live from Star City, Russia, where he has been training for the upcoming mission, I nervously and rapidly wrote back immediately, and on Wednesday, March 19, I was lucky to be one of several journalists who interviewed him live on NASA+, NASA’s live streaming multimedia website formerly known as NASA TV.
Oh yeah, and in the middle of all of this, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 launch blasted off, which would send more folks to the International Space Station, and relieve astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. Williams and Wilmore were only supposed to be in space for eight days, but ended up spending nine months in space because the spacecraft that was supposed to bring them back was deemed unsafe and traveled back to Earth without them. You can watch the return of Williams and Wilmore, along with two others from the ISS, here.
My interview happened the day after all of this, but the standard procedure for interviewing someone is to prepare as much as you can, so I spent the days before watching as much NASA+ as possible, and reading about Jonny Kim, a Navy Seal and Harvard Medical School-trained physician who will be the first Korean-American astronaut in space. I also learned that he was out grocery shopping when he was selected to join NASA’s astronaut corps.
He is a really inspiring guy to me, as a freelancer and someone who’s had to reinvent myself many times in life, because he also has had so many different jobs.
I wanted to ask him unique questions that nobody else had asked him before, and since I am a neuroscientist, I focused on his biomedical background as a doctor. Doing my research, I learned that we also had a lot in common. It turned out we had both worked in the same hospital system, for instance — and, of course, we both enjoyed grocery shopping in Boston.
For my interview, I also talked to my friends and family and asked them what they might want to know about an astronaut. It was not easy to do that on short notice, but it helped a lot that I know a lot of space nerds. I think that, in the future, if I had to interview someone important, I would prepare with a combination of internet research and just asking people I know what they would want to know about that person.
The hardest part about preparing was making sure I got the angle of my questions right — I wanted my questions to be unique and memorable and enjoyable for the astronaut as well as people who would watch the interview. I also wanted to highlight the contribution of biomedical professionals to NASA’s human space exploration missions and ask a couple of things I really wanted to know — like what grocery store Kim was in when he got the news he would be an astronaut???
Well, I got the answers to my questions! In case you’re not convinced that I actually got to talk to a NASA astronaut, here is the snippet of the approximately 90-minute event with my interview.
I’m working on turning the interview into a media article, but the details on that are a bit more murky as I work on processing what probably was the coolest science journalism experience of my life.
For science journalists interested in space journalism, my advice to you is to follow what’s happening at NASA. Even if you’re not known as a space journalist, if, like me, you watch enough space news to qualify you as one, you might find yourself interviewing a NASA astronaut some day!
From speaking with Dr. Kim, I learned a lot not just about journalism, but also about what it means to dream big and work towards goals that feel impossible to benefit humanity. I love that about journalism — the output of my work isn’t always just the written and/or multimedia piece, but also, life lessons learned.
Lastly, in case you are interested in learning about the behind-the-scenes experiences of other journalists interviewing astronauts, I recommend reading Reagan Schrock’s article about interviewing Charlie Duke.
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