Nick here, welcome back to the Nature podcast. This week, we've got something a bit different to the regular show.

To mark the upcoming 50th anniversary of humans first walking on the moon, nature has been doing some extra coverage on all things lunar.

Reporter Alex Witsy has been looking back at the history of the Apollo missions and considering the

future of manned visions to the moon. She joins me on the line today. Hello Alex. Hello.

Thanks for joining me. So the first thing I wanted to talk about was there's a new story

where there's a plan to put humans back on the moon by NASA. Alex, can you tell me exactly

what's being proposed here? So this is sort of a return to the moon. You can think about it as

kind of Apollo, but 50 years later. This is an initiative from the Trump administration,

which has been actually quite active in space policy.

About a year and a half ago, the president said he wanted to send astronauts back to the moon.

And just a couple months ago, they set an even more ambitious schedule.

They said, we don't want to be back to the moon by 2028.

We want to be there by 2024.

So NASA is now racing flat out to try and get the money

and the engineering done to package up humans, send them all the way to the moon, just like we did

with Apollo 50 years ago. Okay. And why is 2024 the number that they're reaching for? Well, you can

interpret that a lot of different ways.

Perhaps most significantly, if the current president is reelected, then we'd have a lunar

landing within the second term of his presidency. And the NASA administrator has talked about

trying to do it quickly to what they call retire political risk, basically kind of ram the

program through and get it done

instead of dragging it out over many years.

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