Helena Burke
speaker
710 appearances
20 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 3d ago
Helena Burke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 20 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 6.
Appearances
But the world's superpowers at the time weren't the only ones trying.
Over in Zambia, a scientist and teacher called Edward Makuka Koloso is busy setting up a science academy.
In 1964, he started recruiting what he called Afronauts, a group of teenagers and two cats who he trained on a large abandoned farm.
Is this the site for your rocket launching programme?
That the BBC went to visit.
And what do you think the reaction of America and Russia will be to Zambia's joining in the space race?
Training involved exercises like rolling astronauts down a hill in steel drums to simulate weightlessness.
And the stated goals of the programme were to establish a Christian ministry to primitive Martians and the hope of Zambia becoming the controllers of interstellar space.
The story is only really well known in Zambia, but now one group is changing that.
Musa Zulu is part of a performance group called Circus Zambia.
The mission is brought to life as a circus spectacle with aerial acrobatics, dancing and songs and astronaut cats.
Cast member Ephraim Pieri told us how it felt finding a new audience.
Kirsty Taylor is one of the programmers for the stage at Wilderness Festival.
Whether you're speaking to the people in the audience who may not often see their stories on stage and showing them that as a festival we think it's important to uplift all voices, or you're speaking to an audience and saying, look, there are stories that are different to yours, I think that help creates a greater sense of understanding.
The Zambian space programme's dream of a human feline presence on the moon may not have worked out in the end, but as the cast told us, that's not the point of telling the story.
Musa Zulu from Circus Zambia, ending that report by Stephanie Prentice.
And that's all from The Happy Pod for now.
If you have a story you think we should cover, we'd love to hear from you.
As ever, the address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.
This edition was mixed by Rachel Bulkley.
Showing 541–560 of 710 · page 28 of 36
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