Last night, the final episode of The Weekly Space Hangout went live on Youtube – after eleven years and hundreds of shows Fraser Cain and Producer Nancy Graziano have decided to call it a day. It came as a surprise, but it was not entirely unexpected – the show was born eleven years ago in a completely different time and in the last few years it became more and more difficult to get the journalists and guests together each week. The final show had Fraser, his fellow partner-in-science Dr. Pamela Gay and long-time WSH journalists Dr. Kimberly Cartier and Dr. Morgan Rehnberg talking about the news and reminiscing about the past decade of Weekly Space Hangouts.

The show was also responsible for the evolution of an amazing community, of which I’ve been a part for a long time and I still am. When the news of the final show came through the back channels, I conspired together with producer Nancy Graziano to write a little message about how the WSH created our whole community and how much the show meant to us. This is what I wrote and what Fraser read out at the beginning of the show:

When the first Weekly Space Hangout went live on eleven years ago, there was no community and no chat to accompany the show – yet! But soon, the first conversations emerged in the Google+ event pages and one day when the show was cancelled, we made our show right there in that primordial chat seeking out the news ourselves. Moments like this led to the evolution of the Weekly Space Hangout Crew that was always appreciated by Fraser Cain and his amazing group of journalists. They loved us being there and harnessed the power of the community to literally drive the show by making us all producers.

First born as a Google+ Community we even survived the demise of a whole social network, becoming platform independent with the help of our own website, Slack and Discord over the years.Sadly, times have changed and while the Weekly Space Hangout is not going to be around anymore, the WSH Crew Community will continue to live on.

Thank you Fraser and all the wonderful journalists and guests for bringing us together and creating such a wonderful community.

It may be the final Weekly Space Hangout, but the community is not going anywhere and there are still many other shows to watch. Fraser Cain is still going on with his interview shows and explainer videos on his own Youtube Channel and Fraser and Pamela are continuing with Astronomy Cast. CosmoQuest is on a brief hiatus but has already been back on Twitch with a more relaxed version of Daily Space and there will also be a new weekly space and astronomy news show called Escape Velocity that is going to be on the Youtube channel.

This is not the end of science communication, it’s just continuing in a different way – the Weekly Space Hangout was only one of the shows in the Universe Today and CosmoQuest world and everyone who created and participated in it will show up again soon in all the other shows!