Lifestyle
L.A.'s 'Lunar Light' takes you to the moon — with VR, improv and escape room puzzles
I’m at peace with the idea that I won’t be visiting space in my lifetime. The cost of space tourism is out of reach for me and the vast majority of Americans. Yet on a recent Saturday afternoon, thanks to a mix of virtual reality and old-fashioned theatrics, I am on the moon.
Looking to my left, I see strange, abstractly blue lights emerging from the gray, rocky moon landscape. Ducking down, I can spot the stars and piece together various constellations. Ahead, I watch the vehicle I’m standing in — technically a shipping container — move through craters on a monorail.
This is “The Lunar Light: Discovery,” part VR experience, part mini-escape room, part science experiment and part one-act play. Currently running through mid-May in Santa Monica, “Lunar Light” uses a small cast of actors to bring the dream of visiting the moon alive. The VR helps, of course, as our goggles hide any facets of the shipping container from view, but it’s the performances that set the tone and sell the illusion. Throughout, we’ll be tasked with minor actions — mining moon rocks in VR, for instance — and the actors will lead, guide and offer moon tidbits, all with a bit of improv-inspired campiness.
Part of “Lunar Light: Discovery” is in virtual reality, when guests can look out digital windows to see views of space. Above, a screenshot from inside the headset.
(Courtesy of Lunar Light: Discovery)
“Lunar Light” is set in the year 2055, when humanity has established a small community on the moon. A mysterious blue-hued mineral has landed on Earth’s natural satellite, and it’s causing strange reactions — people’s emotions are comically off-centered, and power and lighting seem unpredictable. Even a tiny robot — DG-33, sort of cutesy spin on a trash compactor — has developed some quirks, namely a sassy Southern accent.
And yet “Lunar Light” has an underlying mission. The project, which mixes in actual science, is spearheaded by Danielle Roosa, an actor-writer turned space advocate. Roosa’s interest in the cosmos is in her blood, as she is the granddaughter of late Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa. And one of her early gigs was interning at NASA’s Washington, D.C., offices, where she worked in the news and multimedia room.
“I do think that space unites people,” says Danielle Roosa, who led the creation of “The Lunar Light: Discovery.”
(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)
“I realized a lot of my [college] classmates had no idea what NASA was even doing,” says Roosa, 32. “One person said, ‘I thought NASA was out of business.’ The seed was really planted there.”
Or awakened, rather.
“There’s always this conversation, ‘Why space exploration?’” Roosa says. “I think that understanding our place in the solar system helps us protect our home better. It helps us understand what could happen, maybe different ways of living life, going out there and finding different habits. All of those are for a better Earth. Even when my grandfather went to the moon, people were like, ‘Why are we doing this?’ I wasn’t there, but people also say that was the last time America was truly united. ‘Yes, we have to do this. We’re going to land on the moon.’ I do think that space unites people.”
“Lunar Light” is the first major project from Roosa’s firm Back to Space. She has grand ambitions — opening a large-scale immersive facility to house “Lunar Light” and other programs, and taking the experience on the road to various museums. She honed her business acumen after a chance meeting on an airplane with Jim Keyes, a former 7-Eleven and Blockbuster executive, who became a mentor and investor.
The Santa Monica installation is “Lunar Light’s” second pop-up, having had a run in Dallas in 2024. She considers it a proof of concept, the first step in her ultimate goal of building a “10,000-square-foot experience that’s like the Disneyland of space exploration.” Investors were interested but encouraged her to, at least at first, downsize her vision.
“OK, fine,” Roosa says, recalling those conversations. “So we built it out of shipping containers.”
“The Lunar Light: Discovery” builds to a mini escape room-like puzzle.
(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)
The Santa Monica experience, a little longer than an hour, is only in VR for a fraction of that period. After a short jaunt on the moon and a small gamelike activity in which we mine for virtual minerals, we find ourselves in a lab where we’ll play with various crystals. There’s a Tesla coil, and we will test out various electrical energy reactions. The mood, however, isn’t that of a classroom, as the actor manning the lab plays the scene for laughs — all that electrical energy is wreaking havoc on her mind.
Roosa, whose father was a military pilot, moved often throughout her childhood, and she says she escaped via improv shows like “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” That informed “Lunar Light‘s” lighthearted vibe, and after experiencing various actor-driven immersive theater shows, such as one inspired by Netflix series “Bridgerton,” she knew she didn’t want her space exploration experience to rely solely on technology.
“I think human-to-human contact is the only thing that’s going to save us in the world,” Roosa says. “Obviously I like VR, but I think the human connection is what makes the experience.”
“The Lunar Light Discovery”
“Lunar Light” attempts to use VR to facilitate connection. While in the headsets, we can see our fellow participants. At times, we‘re asked to high-five them.
“Let’s say there’s three different groups,” Roosa says, describing how strangers might be brought together for the experience. “They’re all timid. ‘I don’t know you.’ You put the VR headset on, and all of a sudden they’re high-fiving each other and jumping up and down. It’s almost like an equalizer. By the end of it, they feel like one big group.”
The puzzles in “The Lunar Light: Discovery” are designed with collaboration in mind.
(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)
Ultimately, “Lunar Light” builds to a mini escape room puzzle. But don’t expect anything too difficult. Those lightly familiar with escape room challenges should be able to complete it without too much of a fuss. Roosa didn’t want participants to get stuck, as her ultimate goal is creating excitement around space by demystifying it.
Roosa says that many space experiences are “very serious.” She then briefly adopts an exaggerated, deeply male voice. “It is, ‘We are men of science.’ And I’ve always noticed, there is room for some fun. There is room for some comedy. I want people to feel a part of the space conversation.”
Danielle Roosa, second from left, back row, and Georgia Warner, Adam Kitchen, Derek Stusynski and Landon Gorton with guests: Soren McVay, Max Cazier, Leanna Turner, Hannah May Howard, James Cerini, and Eteka Huckaby during “The Lunar Light: Discovery.”
(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)
On a 75-mile cliff-hugging stretch of highway in California, traffic is way up, despite soaring gas prices. And locals expect the busiest summer in years.
The road is Highway 1 in Big Sur, which reopened in January after three years of repair and reconstruction following a pair of landslides. Drivers can once again embark on the state’s most famous road trip, covering the 100 miles between Cambria to the south and Carmel to the north without leaving the two-lane coastal highway. And they’re heading out in big numbers.
Caltrans estimates that as of May, Big Sur restaurant and retailer guest counts are up 40% from last year, and that northbound traffic at Ragged Point, the southern gateway to Big Sur, has risen 900% year-over-year.
People pose for photos near Bixby Bridge. Monterey County’s Board of Supervisors voted to explore a 12-month ban on parking around the bridge.
Safety cones prevent parking along Coast Road near the Bixby Bridge.
“Take your time,” said Kirk Gafill, co-owner of the popular Nepenthe restaurant and president of the Big Sur Chamber of Commerce, offering advice to travelers. “You’re going to be sharing the road with a number of people.”
As travelers rediscover the road, the cost of driving has been shooting skyward. California’s average gas price ($6.11 per gallon as of May 26) is up 26% from the year before. In early April, rates hit $9.99 at the isolated gas station in the Big Sur community of Gorda.
For spring and summer travelers, these numbers would seem to pose a stark question: Stay home and save money, or head for the coast because the road is finally open and it’s still cheaper than flying?
So far, the latter answer is winning big.
Fog lingers off the coast of Highway 1.
“We are definitely seeing a huge uptick in our reservations,” said Megan Handy, assistant general manager at the upscale Treebones resort. She estimated that bookings are 30% or more ahead of last year, and rates are unchanged since then. But “it’s still not feeling super crowded, which is nice. Everything still feels kind of calm.”
But added traffic has raised some anxiety. On May 19, Monterey County’s Board of Supervisors voted to explore a 12-month ban on parking at Bixby Bridge, one of the region’s top photo spots.
Over the years, the number of cars parking near the bridge — often illegally, sometimes impeding emergency vehicles — has risen. The proposed parking moratorium won’t take effect until the supervisors discuss it further.
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Busy as things are, several business owners pointed out that many international travelers have not yet returned — perhaps because most make their plans more than six months ahead, perhaps because of global politics, perhaps a little of each.
The biggest challenge for businesses during this resurgence? “Restaffing and retaining,” said Handy at Treetops.
At Nepenthe, Gafill said his business has seen a 45% boost in guest volume since the road’s reopening. Gafill said he would have expected a 35% pickup, “simply by virtue of reopening the highway.” The additional 10%, he said, might be “all that pent-up demand,” aided by “a very beautiful and very dry winter,” followed by a mild spring.
A lunch crowd dines at popular restaurant Nepenthe.
Another possible factor: Nobody can be sure how long the road will remain open.
To cope with the influx of people, Gafill said, “everybody is trying to recruit and retain their existing staff.”
At the Ragged Point Inn, where rates dropped as low as $149 nightly last fall, rates are back over $200 and staffers are suggesting that customers book at least six months ahead. The inn has reopened its snack bar for the first time since early 2023, and management is investing in capital upgrades and staging live music on weekends throughout the summer.
Business “is up over 100%,” said Diane Ramey, whose family owns the inn. “I know not all of our neighbors are having the same lift, but everybody is doing better.”
Traffic approaching Bixby Bridge.
A visitor poses in an oversized chair at Big Sur River Inn.
Even at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a Benedictine monastery above Lucia, the road’s reopening and coming summer season have made a difference. Bookings are up an estimated 30% at the hermitage, which rent rooms and cottages (for two nights or more) to visitors who agree to its requirement of silence.
Big Sur business owners advise visitors to travel on weekdays for less traffic and the best hotel rates, and to get on the road as early as possible.
Since its opening in 1937, the highway has been vulnerable to landslides and shifting ground, operating on a longstanding cycle of landslide, closure, repair, reopening and then another landslide, or sometimes a fire. The U.S. Geological Survey has identified the Big Sur coastline as one of the most landslide-prone areas in the western United States. The 2023-2026 closure was the longest in the highway’s history.
Over time, road crews have used increasingly sophisticated strategies. In the most recent efforts, Caltrans said, it used drones to help survey the slopes and remotely operated bulldozers and excavators to reduce risks to workers.
During the closure, no traffic was allowed on 6.8-mile span from just north of Lucia until about a mile south of the Esalen Institute. Drivers detoured inland by way of U.S. 101.
Correspondents of CBS’ 60 Minutes pose for a portrait in 2023. From left to right, they are Sharyn Alfonsi, L. Jon Wertheim, Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega, and Anderson Cooper. Former Executive Producer Bill Owens sits on the far right. Only Wertheim, Whitaker and Stahl remain at the program.
CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images/CBS
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CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images/CBS
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When CBS fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday night, the new 60 Minutes executive producer, Nick Bilton, told Pelley it was for insubordination at a staff meeting the day before.
The veteran correspondent argues he was defending the DNA of 60 Minutes and the integrity of its journalism.
The battle royale over the network’s most prestigious and profitable news program is part of a broader fight over the direction of CBS News.
And given CBS’s acquisition by a billionaire family whose business interests have become intertwined with the political interests of President Trump, it reflects a larger war over control of the media in the current moment.
That father and son, Larry and David Ellison, bought CBS’ parent company, Paramount, last summer. In January, they became co-owners of TikTok’s U.S. operations. Now they’re seeking approval from Trump’s regulators to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN.
A glamorous show shorn, for now, of most its stars
CBS fired Cecilia Vega, a correspondent, and Tanya Simon, the executive producer, from 60 Minutes last week. They are shown in this photo at the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on April 25, 2026 in Washington, D.C.
Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images/Variety
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Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images/Variety
But the specifics of this individual episode matter — for 60 Minutes, CBS, its audience of millions, and even the news business itself.
The program has been the most glamorous post in broadcast news. The correspondents are the stars of the show. And now, there are just three of them.
Anderson Cooper left last month, concerned over the direction of the network’s coverage. Last week was a virtual bloodbath: correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were fired. So were a producer and two show executives — including Tanya Simon, a longtime staffer who had stepped up as executive producer when her predecessor resigned in protest before the Ellisons’ takeover.
With Pelley’s ouster, only correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim remain. Now they are considering whether to resign, according to two associates with knowledge.
Their brand-new boss, Bilton, was previously a tech reporter for The New York Times and an investigative reporter for Vanity Fair. He executive-produced a documentary for Netflix about a couple accused of laundering Bitcoin and has been a producer on several other films.
Notably, he has no experience in television news.
Neither does Bari Weiss, whom David Ellison installed as the network’s editor in chief last October. The Ellisons also bought her center-right views-and-news site, The Free Press.
She has maintained that the network of Walter Cronkite needs a makeover for the digital moment. She has also contended for years that CBS, along with the rest of mainstream media, is too reflexively anti-Trump, anti-Israel, and too woke.
A rejection of CBS News executives’ overtures
The new executive producer of 60 Minutes, Nick Bilton, has been a tech journalist and documentary filmmaker, but lacks experience in broadcast news.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
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Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
Bilton attempted to set a conciliatory tone at Monday’s meeting — his first with the show. Pelley, a formidable veteran correspondent and former CBS Evening News anchor, wasn’t having it.
Pelley called Bilton unwelcome and unqualified. And Pelley said that Weiss was attempting to “murder” the program.
In firing Pelley on Tuesday, Bilton said the journalist had hijacked the meeting and rejected overtures to work constructively through their differences. (NPR obtained a copy of the firing notice.) Bilton wrote that Pelley’s “antipathy to the future of the show came through loud and clear.”
In his own statement late Tuesday evening, shared with NPR, Pelley accused CBS’s new news leadership of killing 60 Minutes‘ DNA and pushing him “to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and “to include assertions that are unverified.”
The accusations, to which CBS has not yet responded, echo those made by Alfonsi and Vega, the two correspondents fired last week.
Earlier this year, Alfonsi publicly complained after Weiss held one of her stories at the last minute, and kept it frozen for weeks, demanding an on-camera interview with a Trump White House official that never played out. It ran, unchanged from the intended version, with additional statements from the administration tacked on to the end.
After being fired, Vega said in a statement obtained by NPR that her team had “experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories.”
“Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both censorship and self-driven” Vega continued. “It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”
Weiss previously rejected Alfonsi’s and Vega’s allegations. (CBS said Vega’s claims, for example, were “not based in reality” while expressing appreciation for her work.)
Weiss and Bilton say digital threat requires a 60 Minutes overhaul now
In a meeting this morning, Weiss said that Pelley chose his own path — that is, to be fired rather than to find a way to work through his concerns, according to attendees. The network and Weiss have not yet publicly addressed Pelley’s accusations of interference.
Bilton and Weiss say they respect the show’s traditions, its accomplishments and its legacy of enterprise reporting, extended interviews and visual storytelling. It rose in the ratings 9% over the past season under Simon.
The two news leaders say, however, 60 Minutes needs to be overhauled before it becomes increasingly irrelevant in the era of streamers and other sources of news, information and entertainment in the digital age.
Interviews with 12 current and former CBS News staffers, from producers to executives, suggest great reservations and suspicions remain about Weiss’ judgment and her ability to handle the prominent and even famous journalists on whom her division relies.
Weiss had initially sought to reinvent the CBS Evening News, dropping a two-anchor format that had sagged in the ratings. Cooper turned down Weiss’ overtures to anchor it and left the network altogether, concerned about her approach, according to associates. (They spoke on condition of anonymity because Cooper has not chosen to speak publicly on the matter.)
David Ellison became chairman and CEO of CBS’ parent company, Paramount, after buying it last year.
Noam Galai/Getty Images for Paramount/Getty Images North America
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Noam Galai/Getty Images for Paramount/Getty Images North America
The ratings have continued to sag under new anchor Tony Dokoupil. And some CBS journalists, including producers who have left the Evening News, have publicly accused Weiss of making editorial decisions driven by politics. She has rejected those claims.
The decision to take on overhauling two key shows — one listing, one highly profitable, both high profile — carries significant risks for Weiss and the network, even apart from other considerations.
But the Ellisons’ presence cannot be ignored.
When Shari Redstone was negotiating the sale of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to the Ellisons’ Skydance Media last year, the network announced the end of Stephen Colbert’s late night show. He had been one of the president’s most biting and acerbic critics.
David Ellison also made a series of concessions directly to Trump’s chief broadcast regulator, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, gutting CBS’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and appointing a conservative ombudsman to field complaints of bias against its news reporting.
Carr and other regulators approved the Paramount deal last summer.
The accommodations echo those made by other media titans.
Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos remade the editorial pages of the Washington Post, which he owns, into a far more hospitable zone for Trump at the outset of his second term. So did Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a noted medical device inventor. Amazon and Blue Origin have multi-billion dollar contracts with the federal government. Soon-Shiong’s medical research firm routinely has patent applications up for review with federal regulators. One was approved Tuesday.
The Ellisons are hoping to win approval from federal regulators next month for their purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal valued at more than $110 billion. It would include Warner Bros. Studio, HBO and CNN, among other properties.
As Weiss routs CBS News’ old guard, the question of what role she might play at CNN — and what changes that portends at CBS — hangs over journalists at the two networks. The fate of 60 Minutes serves as a high-stakes case study for both.
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