Texting with an Archivist III: Victoria Castaneda of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab

Behind the scenes with a patron saint of collective knowledge

Sidney Poitier loves space.

Since the 1950s, the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, has been NASA’s primary planetary spacecraft center. It’s where robotic spacecrafts are born and raised, the NASA Deep Space Network is operated, and Earth-orbit and astronomy missions are conducted.

Those are the headlines, but the public doesn’t see much of what goes down “on lab,” as JPL employees call it. But Digital Archivist Victoria Castaneda is hard at work with her colleagues to change that for the crater good. Last week, we texted about diversity, groovy suits, the Golden Voyager Record master, the crowning of a Miss Guided Missile at the annual pageant, the Galactic Ghoul’s appetite for unfortunate spacecrafts, and more!

ON A RELATED NOTE:

Sidney Poitier is still alive!

ON AN UNRELATED NOTE:

Thomas Jefferson was not “a principal writer of the Constitution of the United States.” Jefferson wasn’t even a minor writer of the Constitution. He didn’t even attend the Constitutional Convention. He was in France. His alibi is solid.

James Madison was the principal author of the Constitution. Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

I’ll admit I was a little amused to see Trump’s latest hypocrisy appear on a platform he’s been banned from using—and without letterhead. It’s unprecedented, as I used to say at the top of every interview from 2016-2021. But I was less amused by conservatives who tweeted this sad note with false outrage. People corrected Trump’s error in their mentions, but a day later, they haven’t deleted their tweets.

Thanks for reading! You can find me on Twitter and Instagram and my books, as well as others mentioned on SMK, on Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookstore or library. If you have a question or comment, I want to hear it! studymarrykill@gmail.com.