Dr Nicola Fox Guest Edits Today
Best of Today
BBC
4.0 • 837 Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2023
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr Nicola Fox, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate NASA is the first of our Christmas guest editors this year.
Her programme looks ahead to the launch of the Peregrine Lunar Lander next year which will start the ground work for sending a crewed mission back to the Moon.
Dr Fox, who revealed she was a fan of Duran Duran on her recent Desert Island Discs, talks to band member Nick Rhodes about the influence of space on music. She talks to her counterpart at the European Space Agency, Carole Mundell, about her path into a top space job and she confronts the writers of the last Bond film.
Dr Fox also speaks to Today Presenter Nick Robinson about why her father's interest in space inspired her and why she cries every time a space mission launches.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.6 | And our guest editor today is Dr Nicola Fox, the head of science at NASA. |
| 0:09.5 | My dad sparked in me an imaginative way of looking at our planet. |
| 0:14.9 | He would often look up at the moon at night and say, |
| 0:17.1 | just imagine what it would be like to stand up there. |
| 0:20.9 | One of the themes of her programme is why science isn't scary and how more people can be attracted to the subject. |
| 0:27.7 | She's been speaking to her equivalent at the European Space Agency, also a British woman, Carol Mundell, |
| 0:34.2 | who is the first woman ever appointed to the role of director of the ESA. |
| 0:38.9 | They talked about her journey into a career in space exploration. |
| 0:42.5 | Here's that conversation. |
| 0:44.0 | So I'm kind of interested. |
| 0:45.1 | What was it that first kind of inspired you? |
| 0:47.7 | I have my story about my dad taking me out of my crib when I was eight months old and putting me in front of the TV and giving me a |
| 0:54.6 | running commentary of the Apollo landing. Of course, that's just a nice story because I don't remember |
| 0:59.4 | anything from eight months old. But I remember him always being really inspired by NASA and by the |
| 1:04.8 | moon and by the stars and finding the constellations in the sky and picking out the planets |
| 1:09.5 | and things. And what are your sort of |
| 1:11.1 | early experiences and who really inspired you? My earliest memory going back, actually talking to |
| 1:16.5 | my mum recently about this, was a dress. I used to remember calling my maths dress. And she |
| 1:22.6 | recently found a photograph, an old photograph in an album. And I remember this incredibly pretty |
| 1:26.9 | dress. It was pink and it had symbols on it. And I remember this incredibly pretty dress. It was |
| 1:27.7 | pink and it had symbols on it. And I scanned the photograph and zoomed in on it and I could still |
... |
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