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Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday December 10th, 2020.

I'm John Pothortz, the editor of commentary magazine with me as always,

senior writer Christine Rosen, high Christine,

hi John, executive editor, a Greenwald Hyab,

a John and associate editor Noah Rothman, high Noah.

Hi John.

And with us today commentary tech columnist or tech commentary columnist,

commentaries tech commentary columnist, James B. Megs. Hi Jim, how are you?

I'm doing great, great to be here. So we talked about you're coming on last week.

Little did I realize that following on the article you have in the December 2020 issue of commentary,

we're living in a new space age, would we have you on just 12 hours or 16 hours or something

after Elon Musk's SpaceX tested a giant rocket, the purpose of which I believe is to start the preliminary

process for taking a trip to Mars. Is that right? That's right.

They call it the Starship and it's a much larger rocket than the Falcon that they've been flying to.

They've been using to launch the Dragon capitals that they send to the International Space Station.

And this will be ultimately something more like when it's all complete the scale of the Saturn 5

rockets of the Apollo era that can launch huge payloads. Right now they're only testing what would be

the upper section, the upper stage of the rocket. So they've done a series of tests. So I think

was their eighth test and it was a spectacular success, success until the last couple of seconds.

You know what they do is they it's called a hop test. It flies up and then kind of does a belly flop

floats down through the atmosphere. Then when it's a couple thousand feet off the ground, the rockets

...