This is Mark and Rita's first-ever podcast interview! The Schrocks are fellow Christians and engineer specialists at NASA's Mission Control in Houston, Texas and share with us what working at Mission Control is like. We talk about everything from landing on the moon, to Space Shuttle missions and even what they think of aliens!

And of course, we talk about how we believe it all points to the glory of God. Human space exploration is good, but it isn't safe.

Mark is the chief design engineer behind the Space Shuttle's Rendezvous Pitch Maneuver which was first performed on STS-114, the first shuttle mission after the tragic loss of Columbia in February of 2003.

Twenty-one shuttle missions performed Mark's RPM.

• Discovery: STS-114, STS-121, STS-116, STS-120, STS-124, STS-119, STS-128, STS-131, STS-133

• Atlantis: STS-115, STS-117, STS-122, STS-129, STS-132, STS-135

• Endeavor: STS-118, STS-123, STS-126, STS-127, STS-130, STS-134.

Dan's full interview with Charlie Duke.

Sound clips from Mission Control: NASA/Johnson Space Center.

Reading of Psalm 19 at the beginning is Apollo 16 astronaut and CAPCOM of Apollo 11 Charlie Duke.

Thumbnail image: Mark and Rita Schrock. If you zoom in, you can find Rita standing center in a black shirt and khakis. Mark is standing directly left, to Rita's right. Astronauts at the International Space Station took the autographed picture of the Mission Control Visiting Vehicle Officer group to space and hung it on a window with Earth hanging silently in the background.

Podbean enables our podcast to be on Apple Podcasts and other major podcast platforms. To support Good Heavens! on Podbean as a patron, you can use the Podbean app, or go to https://patron.podbean.com/goodheavens. This goes to Wayne Spencer. If you would like to give to the ministry of Watchman Fellowship or to Daniel Ray, you can donate at https://www.watchman.org/daniel. Donations to Watchman are tax deductible.

How does a short passage in Mark chapter 2 point to Jesus as Lord and God? And what might Jesus' healing of the paralytic say about the nature of the universe and our place within it? Can we trust Mark's account as real history?

This is a short audio essay examines these questions in greater detail and hopefully provides us with some encouragement not to be discouraged in times when God seems silent.

Thumbnail photo credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI, A. Pagan (STScI)). This is Pismis 24, a small star cluster in the constellation Scorpius, the Scorpion. The "small" mountain peak is over five light years in height - with a single light year being close to 6 trillion miles. That is a rather tall peak.

The very One who came under our roof decorated this and all the other wondrous entities in the vaulted roof of the heavens. He who names and numbers all the stars also heals our broken hearts and binds up our wounds (Psalm 147).

Podbean enables our podcast to be on Apple Podcasts and other major podcast platforms. To support Good Heavens! on Podbean as a patron, you can use the Podbean app, or go to https://patron.podbean.com/goodheavens. This goes to Wayne Spencer. If you would like to give to the ministry of Watchman Fellowship or to Daniel Ray, you can donate at https://www.watchman.org/daniel. Donations to Watchman are tax deductible.

Atheists have often claimed that the Bible makes no scientific predictions and therefore cannot be a valid source of knowledge about the universe.

But this is simply unfounded. First, modern science as we understand it today did not exist thousands of years ago. To demand that our modern expectations should be imposed upon the text of Scripture is anachronistic eisegesis. It is our imposing our expectations and understanding into the texts of the Bible.

But second, Psalm 19, written by King David some 3,000 years ago, tells us that the heavens are continually pouring forth speech and knowledge, day after day and night after night.

Nowhere is this pouring forth more clearly demonstrated today than in the latest ground-based Simonyi Survey Telescope perched high atop the peak of El Peñón at an elevation of 8,799 feet. It is the main eye to the sky of the newly operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory in north central Chile.

This technological marvel pulls down 20 terabytes of data, every night! Ten times the storage capacity size of most new computer hard drives or smart phones. Over the course of its proposed ten-year survey of the southern hemisphere, astronomers hope to collect some 500 petabytes of data in total! One petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.

You can see more wonders and find out more about the telescope at the observatory's main website. https://rubinobservatory.org

The image on this month's thumbnail comes from the observatory website.

Wayne has written a companion article on the telescope and observatory. You can find that here. https://creationanswers.net/answersblog/2025/09/01/so-much-more-the-vera-rubin-telescope/

Other related links:

https://www.astronomy.com/science/first-ever-images-released-by-the-vera-c-rubin-observatory/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_mSAqw_DBY

Podbean enables our podcast to be on Apple Podcasts and other major podcast platforms. To support Good Heavens! on Podbean as a patron, you can use the Podbean app, or go to https://patron.podbean.com/goodheavens. This goes to Wayne Spencer. If you would like to give to the ministry of Watchman Fellowship or to Daniel Ray, you can donate at https://www.watchman.org/daniel. Donations to Watchman are tax deductible.