Coffee & Geography Season 6 Episode 14
Talking to Amy Imhoff meant bringing together several of my favourite things: space, geography, Star Trek, science communication, feminist media, public engagement, and the kind of wonderfully nerdy conversation where you begin with astronomy and somehow end up at Taylor Swift, dark skies, comet juice and Captain Janeway.
Amy is Director of Digital Brand at the Astro Society, with a background spanning digital media, event management, STEAM partnerships, science fiction, feminist pop culture, aerospace communications and work connected to the NASA IMAP mission. Her Astro Society bio also describes her lifelong Star Trek fandom, her writing and speaking across science fiction and STEM spaces, and her work helping build community across space, fandom and academia.
So yep, I was always going to enjoy this one.
We started, as Coffee & Geography often does, with a drink. Amy had Gatorade, which is not technically coffee or tea, but I think we’ll allow it. There was also chat about iced coffee, caramel nonsense, chai lattes and London Fog, which apparently is Earl Grey tea turned into something latte-adjacent. Naturally this became Picard-adjacent as well, because once you put Earl Grey and Star Trek in the same room, you know where it’s going.
East Coast geography and the routes we are expected to follow
When I asked Amy about geographical identity, she began with the East Coast. Pennsylvania, the Lehigh Valley, Bucks County, Catholic schooling, Connecticut, Fairfield University, New York City within reach, and family connections that stretched through New York, Baltimore and Italian Catholic family geographies.
What interested me was the expectations tied to that list of places. Amy talked about growing up in an environment where there was a fairly narrow path laid out for girls: do well at school, go to college, meet someone, marry young, have children, follow the expected script.
That’s geography too. Not just landscapes, but social landscapes. Not just where we live, but what a place teaches us about what kind of life is considered normal or acceptable. Amy didn’t reject all of it. She spoke warmly about family, place and relationships. But she also made clear that she did not want the narrow version of the path that had been assumed for her.
I found that interesting because so many podcast conversations come back to this idea: place shapes us but not always comfortably. Sometimes it gives us belonging. Sometimes it gives us something to push against. Often both.
The Space Shuttle Enterprise and a lost Mercury
There was a moment early in the conversation where Amy mentioned being at the Intrepid in New York, where the Space Shuttle Enterprise prototype is housed, and that immediately set off a memory for me. I’ve technically seen the Space Shuttle Enterprise too, although I have no memory of it because I was about one year old. My parents took me to see it when it came to Stansted Airport during its European tour in the early 1980s, and there is a photo of very small me with the shuttle in the background.
That led me into the story of the time I lost Mercury at the dentist.
When I was little, we made a model solar system at school. At the end of the project, we got to take home one of the planets. I got Mercury, which was basically a lump of plasticine with pencil holes in it, but it was Mercury and therefore very important. We went straight to the dentist after school and I accidentally left Mercury there. I was devastated. The next morning, an envelope came through the door and the dentist had returned my planet.
Looking back, I am not sure that using patient records to hand-deliver a model planet would be quite so acceptable now, but at the time I was overjoyed.
So space has always been there for me. I wanted to be an astrophysicist at one point. That didn’t happen, partly because life takes turns and partly because physics and maths had some opinions about my plans, but Earth became my next great love. Geography, climate, environment, place, weather, landscape, people. If I could not spend my life studying the stars, then studying the planet beneath them seemed a pretty good alternative.
Amy then gave me one of my favourite lines of the whole discussion:
“Every country shares a border with space.”
I love that because it is both space communication and geography. It reframes the planet. It reminds us that the atmosphere is not a lid, national borders are not the final edge of anything, and Earth is part of a much bigger system.
Literature, marketing and getting into space sideways
Amy describes her route into STEM or STEAM as non-traditional, and I always like hearing these routes because I think young people need more examples of careers that do not look like a straight corridor.
She studied literature, has a master’s in literature, worked in marketing and technical writing, and spent years writing about technology before moving into the space sector. The arts thread is important – Amy was very clear that the “A” in STEAM is not decoration. The arts have always shaped how humans think about space, from early visual representations and storytelling to science fiction, music, design, public communication and mission branding.
That’s something I wish more people understood. Science does not simply arrive in people’s minds because the facts are correct. People need meaning, metaphor, story, trust, language, imagery, curiosity and emotional connection. It’s a really important mode of communication.
Amy talked about working in technical writing and feeling like a replaceable cog in a big corporate machine, which I suspect many people will recognise in one way or another. She then started her own digital content business, worked across technology and media, and eventually found her way into space communication after being encouraged by people in the space community who recognised that her skills were needed.
That part of the conversation was really important, because Amy wasn’t saying everyone needs to become an astronaut, engineer or astrophysicist to belong in space. She was saying space needs storytellers, marketers, designers, communicators, educators, welders, fuel specialists, food growers, data people, artists, photographers, mission managers, and all the other people who make the work possible.
As she put it later:
“We always say we need everyone to get to space.”
Artemis, observation and exogeography
A big part of the episode centred on Artemis. We watched and discussed a clip from the Artemis II lunar flyby where the astronauts were describing the lunar surface in detail. NASA’s Artemis II crew page names Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen as the crew selected for the first crewed Artemis flight around the Moon.
What caught me was the observational language. The astronauts were describing craters, shadows, the terminator line, light, dark, ridges, valleys, high elevation points catching sunlight and features becoming visible as the angle changed.
I got very excited because this was exogeography. I know, I know, of course I would say that. But it really was. Observation, description, scale, surface features, light and shadow, physical landscape, positional language, field notes, changing perspective. It sounded like fieldwork, just fieldwork from thousands of miles above the Moon.
While we can have sensors, cameras, models, datasets and all sorts of brilliant technology, the ability to look carefully and describe what is there remains powerful. When astronauts are verbally recording what they see, they are doing something that geography teachers try to train students to do all the time: notice, describe, compare, locate, use terminology, explain what is changing and why.
Amy also made a useful point about NASA media being available for public use. NASA’s own media guidelines state that NASA content such as images, audio and video is generally not subject to copyright in the United States and can be used for educational or informational purposes, while also noting restrictions around logos, identifiers, endorsement and third-party copyrighted material.
That’s a gift for educators and communicators, and we should use it.
Science communication and public trust
Amy and I both came back several times to science communication. She spoke about how space companies and nonprofits haven’t always been good at telling their stories, especially through social media, and how missions such as Artemis show the value of bringing the public along.
That resonated with my climate work. I often get asked why, if the science is so clear, we have not solved the problem yet. The answer is partly political, partly economic, partly cultural, partly structural, and partly because facts do not move through society on their own. People need trust. They need stories. They need to understand relevance. They need to see themselves in the issue. They need people who can translate without patronising.
Amy mentioned IMAP, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, which NASA describes as a mission to map the boundary of the heliosphere, the huge bubble created by the Sun that surrounds and helps protect the solar system. NASA also describes IMAP as supporting real-time observations of solar wind and energetic particles that can affect near-Earth space weather.
Now, heliophysics can sound intimidating if you are not already in that world. Amy’s job, and the job of good science communicators generally, is to help people find a way in. She talked about asking people what questions they had for IMAP scientists, and how adults were often afraid of asking a “stupid” question. Children, in contrast, would just ask what they wanted to know.
We say all the time that there are no stupid questions, but a lot of adults have had curiosity trained out of them by embarrassment, comparison or fear of looking ignorant. Science communication has to make curiosity feel safe again.
You do not need four degrees from everywhere
One of my favourite things Amy said was that people can work on NASA missions without having four degrees from Harvard, Yale and MIT.
I immediately felt that because I don’t have a master’s or a PhD at the time of chatting to Amy. I have an undergraduate degree and teacher training, and somehow I now work in the same department as world-leading climate scientists. I sometimes find that funny, and slightly baffling, but it is also a reminder that careers are not only built from qualifications. They are built from networks, persistence, volunteering, curiosity, showing up, asking questions, and being willing to do the thing before you feel completely ready.
Amy shared a lovely story about meeting Nikki Fox from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, who recognised her work on IMAP through social media and comms. That kind of thing matters. Not because everyone should be chasing recognition, but because putting your work out there can create connections you cannot predict.
I used my usual pebble-in-a-lake analogy. A pebble is small, and there are thousands of other pebbles, but if it is thrown into the water it still makes ripples. You may never see where all those ripples go, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.
Taylor Swift, feminism and community
The “spilling the beans” section was that Amy is a huge Taylor Swift fan. I am not a Swiftie in the same way, but I was very interested in how Amy talked about it, because it was not just “I like the songs.”
Amy spoke about Taylor Swift as a lyricist, about literature, feminism, mythology, personal voice, media criticism, women being torn down, and the way concerts can create emotionally safe, collective spaces. The Eras Tour opened its European leg in Paris in May 2024, with shows at Paris La Défense Arena, which is relevant because Amy talked about attending the Eras Tour in Paris.
What I especially liked was the connection Amy made between live music and space communication. She described the feeling of being in a crowd where people are experiencing something together, and said that this is the kind of community feeling she wants to create with space.
That makes complete sense to me. Science can feel distant if it is presented only as information. But if people experience wonder collectively, whether through a concert, a planetarium, a lunar livestream, a school event, a star party or a shared telescope in a park, then science becomes relational. It becomes something people feel part of.
Geopolitics, dark skies and comet juice
At the end of the episode, Amy had to respond to the word left by the previous guest: geopolitics. She took it straight into the politics of Earth, climate change, national parks, dark skies and the importance of supporting organisations that protect them.
DarkSky International describes light pollution as the human-made alteration of outdoor light levels from natural conditions and says it disrupts wildlife, affects human well-being, wastes money and energy, contributes to climate change and blocks our view of the universe.
I remember the first time I saw a properly dark sky. I was on a school trip to the Brecon Beacons when I was about 11 or 12, and I looked up and saw the Milky Way. I had seen constellations before from where I grew up, but this was different. It made me realise how much had been hidden by light pollution.
Amy said that the loss of the night sky is having a psychological effect on humanity. I believe that. I think our disconnection from nature, including the sky, is part of the wider mental health crisis of environmental degradation. We’re not just losing species, habitats, seasons and dark skies, but losing relationships too.
Then, because it is Coffee & Geography, the conversation somehow arrived at comet juice. Amy told a story about someone describing water as comet juice, because of the role comets have played in bringing water into the solar system. I usually go for the much less elegant “dinosaur wee” route when talking about the water cycle, so comet juice feels like a definite upgrade.
What I took away
I came away from this conversation thinking about space as a geography of belonging.
That might sound a bit grand, but I mean it quite simply. Space is often presented as something far away, full of specialists, rockets, astronauts, engineers and acronyms. Amy’s whole approach pushes back against that by saying that space is for everybody. Not because everybody will go there, but because everybody lives under it, depends on it, imagines through it, tells stories about it, and shares a planet that touches it.
Every country shares a border with space.
That line also makes climate and environmental education feel bigger. We are not just protecting “the environment” as if it is an external thing. We are protecting the only home we know in a vast, hostile, beautiful universe. Amy said space does not discriminate. It does not care who you love, what flag you fly, or what colour your skin is.
Space reminds us that we are human beings trying to solve problems together.
That is where geography, science communication and fandom unexpectedly meet. Star Trek gives people stories of inclusive futures. NASA missions give us shared moments of wonder. Dark skies remind us of what we are losing. Science communicators help people ask questions without shame. Artists, writers, musicians, educators and marketers help people care.
And sometimes, all of that starts with a conversation about Gatorade, Lego, Captain Janeway and a lost lump of plasticine called Mercury.
🔗 Amy’s personal website: https://www.amyimhoff.com
🔗 Amy’s Astro Society profile: https://astrosociety.org/who-we-are/staff.html/title/amy-imhoff
🔗 NASA Night Sky Network: https://science.nasa.gov/skywatching/night-sky-network/
🔗 NASA IMAP mission: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/imap/
🔗 NASA Artemis II mission: https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-ii/
🔗 NASA Images and Media Usage Guidelines: https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/
🔗 DarkSky International: https://darksky.org/
🔗 Kate Mulgrew official website: https://www.katemulgrew.com/
🔗 Taylor Swift Eras Tour Paris: https://www.timeout.com/news/taylor-swift-in-paris-eras-tour-timings-dates-set-list-and-everything-you-need-to-know-050224
