Giday humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's an uncomfortable question for you.

What do you make of this whole quest to go and colonize Mars and the rich boys with their toys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with their spaceships?

Is it just a big distraction? Or could we be on the brink of a

reinvigorated era of space adventure? Will NASA ever get itself together? It has a new administrator

that President Trump has appointed, still needs to be cleared by the Senate, but this guy is very different

from any NASA boss who has come before him. And there is now a real plan, an actual plan,

to go back to the moon. It's partly motivated by the fact that China intends to send human

beings to the surface of the moon by 2030, and America once again is being

spurred into action for geopolitical reasons, if not scientific ones. I want to speak to the person

in the world who probably knows more about space technology, the space race, the geopolitics

of it, and NASA, and all of these guys, than anybody else. He's the editor at large of Time

magazine in the United States. He's the editor at large of Time magazine in the United States.

He's the author of 13 books, including Lost Moon, the Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13,

which is the book on which the movie Apollo 13 was based.

His new book is Gemini, Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story.

And I wanted to understand not only what is going on

in Maga land between Trump and Elon and the new administrator of NASA, what their intentions are,

whether anything will happen, but also the future of space exploration and how it fits into

the history of humankind, the tension between our desire to conquer and

our desire to make things right

here at home. The conversation

starts a little wonky and

...