Two High-schoolers Talk About The Colonization Of Mars

My name is Gavin Guldner, and my co-host is Michael ‘Mikey’ Kendall. I have no degrees as I am a high schooler, but I love everything to do with space and Mars. I have over 700 hours on Kerbal Space Program, and I am really into orbital dynamics. I am a Trekkie, and have been since my uncle gave me a set of vintage Enterprise blueprints when I was 12. My room is full of Star Trek memorabilia and posters, and I have many Star Trek t-shirts. I have read The Martian many times and also have read the Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson. I attended Riverside STEM Academy for my middle school years, and loved physics and astronomy. I met my co-host when I started my high school, and we originally started the podcast as a class project. It was supposed to be posted on the class YouTube channel, but we instantly declined the offer, as we wanted it on our personal channel. When searching for ideas for a name, we eventually decided on a Latin name. We wanted to somehow incorporate our school’s mascot into the name, as well as something to do with space. We ended up with Titanas Siderum. It translates to Titans of the Stars (Google Translate actually translates it to Titans Stars, but try putting in Titans of the Stars, it gives the same thing). Our podcast topic was easy to decide on. The story is actually kind-of funny. It started with me asking Mikey if he wanted to do a podcast on war with me, but he said he was going to do a podcast on astrodynamics. I was shocked, as I thought I was the only kid that liked it. I said I would love to join him, and asked what else it was about, and he said he wanted to talk about Mars Colonization. It was an instant yes. So, here we are, with the topic of Mars Colonization. We think it will change slightly to talk about Mars in general, and also space. 

Currently, our main listeners are friends, family, but about 30% are people who we have no relation to. We recently got an email from Brendan Byrne, another space podcaster and reporter, saying that he loves the ambition and that he subscribed. Our listeners are typically people who love Mars and the idea of colonizing it.

Simple enough, we started Titanas Siderum as a school project for a class called iCreate. Obviously, our initial goal was to get a good grade, but we soon realized that we wanted to make this bigger. I quickly got a podcast hosting site, and chose BuzzSprout as our host. From there, we uploaded our first episode, which we called, “Mic Test.” It was an idea from the first podcast I listened to, Reply All, in which their first episode was called Mic Test. Ours was just under a minute and thirty seconds, and we had a stupidly long intro, which we also put in the first real episode. We started our podcast on November 8, 2018. It took us about two days to release our first episode, and then a day to get it uploaded to iTunes.

We currently release an episode every month, with the next one being released very quickly. We are also working on a weekly series, called The Cosmic Scoop, in which one of us will give the weeks space news. It takes us about four to six hours to produce each episode, working non-stop. We usually record after school, and then I edit it on the weekends. As of December 6, 2018, we fund it ourselves, and I just bought a new mic, so that drained $50. We are hoping to get patrons on our Patreon so we don’t have to work extra to fund our podcast.

Mikey and I gain knowledge from our research. I learn a lot from the books I read about podcasting and editing. Right now, we have no sponsors, and a revenue of exactly $0.00. So right now, we are doing it out of our own time.

Our current microphone is a BLUE Snowball iCE. I edit on a 2016 HP laptop running Windows 10. It has 12 gigs of RAM and a pretty decent graphics card. It has a Intel I5 7th gen CPU in it. I use Audacity to record and edit, and I love it. I also use OBS and OpenShot Video Editor for our YouTube channel.

As of now, we will find guests by relations. I’m not supposed to tell you this, but we read off notes. We prepare them weeks in ahead.

Our listeners find us from iTunes, Google Podcasts, and mostly word-of-mouth and social media. We particularly like our Wix site.

We learned a lot from listening to other podcasts, reading books, and watching some of Pat Flynn’s podcast tips videos. We would recommend that you dive in and take a chance if you’re a new podcaster.

Our website is titanassiderum.tk. You can find us on YouTube by searching Titanas Siderum. Our Reddit is reddit.com/r/titanassiderum.
Our Patreon is patreon.com/titanassiderum.
You can email me, Gavin, and gavin@titanassiderum.tk, Mikey at mikey@titanassiderum.tk, and our feedback email is feedback@titanassiderum.tk.