Marshall here. Welcome back to The Realignment.

The show has spent a lot of time covering a topic of space this year. Back in May I spoke

with Elon Musk's biographer Ashley Vance about his book When the Heavens Went On Sale,

which covers the non-billionaire aspect of the private space race in the United States

and across the globe. Last week I debated tech critic Jonathan Taplin about his opposition to

manned Mars missions and his skepticism of the overall privatization of America's space efforts.

Today then, my guest Lauren Grush, the space reporter at Bloomberg, has a new book out that I'm

willing to speak with her about. It's called Six, the untold story of America's first women astronauts.

This conversation we cover everything from the history of NASA after the moon landings,

the successes and failures of the space shuttle program, the initial barrier to women astronauts,

and the new efforts to diversify the space program along with NASA's return to the moon.

What's great stuff here? Hope you all enjoy this conversation. Huge thank you to the foundation

for American Innovation, supporting the work of this podcast.

Lauren Grush, welcome to The Realignment.

Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I'm really excited to speak with you. As we're just discussing,

you cover the space category for Bloomberg, which is kind of fun if you say it out loud because

like that's an entire geographic. I'm kind of missing terminology category,

including basically everything outside of Earth orbit, but you cover space and you have a new book

out about women in the US space program. We'll get into all that, but I'd love to just

just start by just asking you, what are you particularly excited about when it comes to the space

category that's outside of the various SpaceX propaganda bits that I've done that that's

a few years. Listeners haven't heard that as much. Well, that's a tough one because SpaceX does

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