America Shoots For the Moon Again: Houston, We Have Neil deGrasse Tyson
Americast
BBC
4.3 • 3.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 February 2024
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Back on earth, Donald Trump’s legal troubles are mounting and the Republican presidential hopeful now faces debts of over half a billion dollars.
We assess how the former president will try to pay off these debts and what effect it might have on his run for the White House.
And on the evening that the US returned to the moon, Neil deGrasse Tyson - one of America’s most famous astrophysicists - talks to us about why commercial space ventures are in fashion and why people are struggling to know where to get their facts.
HOSTS:
• Sarah Smith, North America editor • Justin Webb, Radio 4 presenter • Marianna Spring, disinformation and social media correspondent • Anthony Zurcher, North America correspondent
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US Election Unspun: Sign up for Anthony’s new BBC newsletter: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-68093155
This episode was made by George Dabby with Rufus Gray, Catherine Fusillo, and Claire Betzer. The technical producer was Mike Regaard. The series producer is George Dabby. The senior news editor is Jonathan Aspinwall.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | We choose to go to the moon and this decade and do the other things, |
| 0:09.4 | not because they are easy, but because they are hard because that goal. The wonderful words, the moving words, |
| 0:17.0 | John F. Kennedy back in 1962 trying to get public support in the United States for the idea |
| 0:22.1 | of getting a man to the moon and getting it done |
| 0:24.3 | before 1970 which of course they managed to do I often say to my own children we do |
| 0:29.6 | things not because they are easy but because they are hard and they look at me as if I am |
| 0:34.3 | completely crazy but those were the days when people took this kind of stuff very |
| 0:38.2 | seriously and it worked for him and it worked for America but and this is the point of what I'm saying it hasn't worked in the years since in the sense that it has been 52 years now since the United States managed to put someone on the moon. |
| 0:54.4 | And the big deal this week is that a company called Intuitive Machines is aiming to be the first to achieve |
| 0:59.7 | what they say will be a controlled moon landing and doing it in a private spacecraft. |
| 1:04.5 | So they hope to find frozen water to try to sustain a lunar base that might exist one day. |
| 1:11.2 | We're going to be talking to the astrophysicist Neil |
| 1:14.1 | degrass Tyson, one of America's great science communicators, but also |
| 1:19.6 | someone with a really detailed knowledge from the inside insight not just about astrophysics but also |
| 1:24.5 | about the way in which the American state deals with science. |
| 1:28.1 | He's been on boards advising the Pentagon etc etc. |
| 1:31.1 | Anyway he's coming up in this episode, plus back on earth, very much back on earth. |
| 1:35.2 | Nicky Haley trying to win the primary in her home state of South Carolina. |
| 1:39.0 | Finally, it arrives this weekend. |
| 1:41.6 | She hasn't frankly got any hope at all of winning it, but how |
| 1:44.4 | close can she get to Donald Trump? Might she get close enough to carry on in the |
... |
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