It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. So, Ahtar, when you think of NASA,

you think of spaceships, the moon, Mars rovers, right, the act of seeing a dot

in the night sky and saying, let's go there. But human ambition has gradually ceded over the decades

to the bureaucratic realities of funding and politics and over the last few years, to Elon Musk in particular.

And so as space travel has increasingly become the domain of the private sector, NASA

risks becoming a sandbox for the whims and desires of the world's richest man.

Joining us now to explain how this happened and what the consequences

might be is Franklin IV, staff writer at the Atlantic. Maybe you saw his most recent article

published a week ago titled How NASA Engineered Its Own Decline. Hey Franklin, welcome back to WNYC.

Always great to be here. And before we get to how we got here or why we should care,

early on in your article, you say that Elon Musk and SpaceX have superseded NASA. How do you mean

superseded? Well, that once upon a time when we wanted to do something in space, by we, I mean the United States, we had her own infrastructure for accomplishing that, whether it was launching satellites, whether it was going to traveling to the moon or whether it was traveling to the orbit orbit, NASA had its own rockets. Now,

NASA is merely a passenger on Elon Musk's rockets. But there's something even deeper that's

transpired, which is that the United States used to set its own vision for what it was going to do.

And as NASA has lost confidence in itself,

and the culture has shifted, the vision for what we do in space has really been outsourced to

Elon Musk with his cultural prestige, with the clarity that he has of his vision with his alliance now,

or the alliance that he did have for a time with Donald Trump, which helped reset

the American agenda for what we accomplished in space.

We've transferred not just the basic infrastructure to Elon Musk.

To some extent, we've allowed him to impose his vision

for what we accomplished in the heavens on us. So before we even get into what that vision is,

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