Make Me Smart: Lunar Edition
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week’s launch of Artemis II marked the first crewed mission to the moon in over 50 years. This time around, the spaceflight industry looks pretty different, with private companies playing a more dominant role. On today’s show, Kimberly gets into the future of NASA and the commercial space sector with Ars Technica’s senior space editor Eric Berger. Plus, why are we going back to the moon, anyway?
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- "Artemis II is unlikely to be the cultural touchstone Apollo 8 was, and that's OK" from Ars Technica
- "Isaacman aims to reinvigorate NASA’s image, starting with the moon" from Politico
- "Trump FY2027 NASA Budget Supports Moon Missions, But Cuts Everything Else" from SpacePolicyOnline.com
- "Big Banks Seeking a Piece of SpaceX’s I.P.O. Must Subscribe to Elon Musk’s Grok" from The New York Times
- "SpaceX quietly files for big bang IPO" from SpaceNews
- "Artemis II: What's on the Menu?" from NASA
- "Astronaut Reid Wiseman was wrong about how rockets get to space" from Marketplace
We love hearing from you. Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email makemesmart@marketplace.org.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:12.7 | Thank you to everyone who is joining us either in the YouTube live stream or listening later to the podcast. |
| 0:18.4 | We are glad to have you with us. This is Economics on Tap, our weekly |
| 0:22.1 | happy hour episode, and regular listeners to Economics on Tap or the podcast in general will know |
| 0:28.4 | that space is one of my favorite topics. And this week, of course, was full of space news |
| 0:35.1 | with the launch of Artemis II, the first crude mission to the |
| 0:38.7 | moon vicinity, at least, in over 50 years. So we're going to talk about that and how the landscape |
| 0:44.6 | of the spaceflight industry has changed and what role private companies in particular are playing |
| 0:49.7 | in all of this. So here to make us smart about this is Eric Berger. He's a senior space editor at |
| 0:54.9 | Ars Technica, an author of two books about spaceflight, liftoff about the rise of SpaceX, |
| 1:01.3 | and re-entry about SpaceX and the development of reusable rockets. Welcome to the show, Eric. |
| 1:08.3 | Hey, thanks very much, Kimberly. All right, before we get into drinks, we have an extra poll today. |
| 1:14.6 | So for those of you watching in the YouTube live stream, did you watch the coverage of the |
| 1:20.6 | Artemis II launch live? |
| 1:22.6 | And while everyone weighs in on that poll, let's discuss drinks. |
| 1:26.6 | Eric, what did you bring? |
| 1:29.0 | Oh, I'm very boring today. |
| 1:31.0 | Sorry, I'm having to continue to monitor the Artemis II mission while it's in flight. |
| 1:34.7 | And if there's some kind of emergency, I would need to head over to the space center. |
| 1:38.9 | So I just brewed up some herbal tea with some vitamin C infusion. |
| 1:44.0 | I'm getting over a bit of a cold. So |
| 1:45.9 | just iced tea for me today. I love that. And I should mention that you're in Houston, |
... |
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