Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center,

episode 112, 21st century space travel. I'm Gary Jordan and I'll be your host today.

If you're new to the show, we bring in the experts to talk about all different parts of our space agency and human spaceflight.

Planning spaceflight missions can be tough.

You hear us today discussing the Artemis program, which sends human to the surface of the moon in a few short

years. These types of plans, even years down the road, are ambitious and aggressive when talking

about human spaceflight. And a major part of being successful is overcoming budgetary,

technological, and policy constraints way in advance. You're probably familiar with President

Kennedy's declaration into Congress in May of 1961, which was reiterated

at Rice University in Texas in September of 62.

He declared that we would put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade.

NASA met this challenge with the right support and funding to match the goal, but later years

prove that this would not always be the case.

Decades passed, many presidents went by, and NASA's exploration

goals seemed ever so on the horizon. What NASA needed was a way to focus its efforts and think

strategically. Best way to do that? Long-term planning.

It was 1999 when NASA put together the Decatur Planning Team under Administrator Dan Golden, which

would dedicate time to laying out exactly how NASA could achieve its

goals over a long period of time and fight for a budget that would support these efforts.

The Decatur Planning team would see changes in its name

and direction in following years, but its roots would remain the same to focus on

where we're going and exactly how we're going to get there. Today we're sitting down with Stephen Garber and Glenn Asner,

...