When I think of government officials, somebody might want to murder, to threaten with anthrax.

The Deputy Assistant Director of NASA isn't even on my top 10. It would never occur to me that that

would be somebody that would ever get to that point. But my guest today, Lori Garver, once had to be escorted out of an event by federal security because somebody sent a powdery death threat against her.

Which seems odd. an anthrax scare for the second in command of NASA.

Weird, until you begin to consider something. Weird. isn't tiny disputes over premium versus unleaded rocket fuel or whether we put more

money into the space station or the telescope or the space shuttle. It's not just budgeting.

The fight is about who controls space, who has access to it?

Is space the purview of bureaucrats, lab codes,

and old reconstituted Nazi rocket scientists

or as the playground of billionaires,

robber barons in space, to exploit and mold for their own personal ambitions

rather than part of a grand national project.

Already, we've projected old ideological battle lines onto the stars themselves.

But if that weren't enough, if we screw up, if we back the wrong horse,

if we go to socialist or to free market, innovation stalls, we fall behind the likes of Russia and China. Whatever opportunities avail themselves in the orbit around the Earth will be pioneered by autocracies with America playing catch-up.

And in the long term, how we as a civilization govern and fund spaceflight is a bet, it's a gamble, one which will determine if we remain an

earthbound civilization trapped in parochial disputes and fights over limited resources going back thousands and

thousands of years repeating ad nauseum forever until we're wiped out by an asteroid

or a nuclear bomb or if we slip the surly bonds of Earth itself and build

colonies on Mars and mine the asteroid belt and become a civilization of spacefarers who alter the nature of human society forever.

That's what's at root here. That's the fight, the fight, and those are the stakes who controls space.

And by picking which horse we're going to bet on, do we ever truly get there?

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