Hello and welcome to the space policy edition of Planetary Radio.

I'm Casey Dreyer, the chief of space policy here at the Planetary Society.

This is our monthly show that examines the processes that enable space exploration.

This month we have Franklin IV. He is a staff writer at the Atlantic

magazine who recently published a very insightful piece about the role of private industry,

of Elon Musk, in defining the public's relationship to space, and in his

framing, the decline of NASA as a consequence of filling that same role, and tying it to larger

societal trends of the, as he puts it, the parable of government, the loss of trust in government in the United States

and placing it in the hands of not a collective enterprise, but an individual enterprise.

It's a very interesting piece. If nothing else, it very nicely summarizes the last 25 years of space exploration in the United

States and the dynamics and potential consequences of turning over various aspects of

control of the space program to an individual. Franklin IV is a staff writer at the Atlantic and previously the author of a number of books,

most recently the last politician inside Joe Biden's White House.

And prior to that, I think relevantly to this discussion, a book on big tech called

The World Without Mind, The Existential Threat of Big Tech.

Franklin IV is not a space person, and he describes himself as that. He's a political commentator,

a writer. And I think that's fascinating to explore how he saw NASA before and after he wrote this piece, which was very well

researched. I, full confession here, I was a source that he used when putting together this article,

but I talked to him many months ago. He spent a long time putting this piece together,

and I was impressed by the amount of depth and thought that

went into it. Seeing this reflection of how the space program presents itself to those, in a sense,

outside the activities. I am a space fan. I think about space literally every day, most of the day,

...