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Earlier this month, Elon Musk announced that his company, SpaceX, has shifted its focus from Mars to the moon, with the mission to build a self-growing city on the moon, which he says they can potentially achieve in less than 10 years. Now, that might

sound hard to believe. After all, no human has stepped foot on the lunar surface since 1972.

But now, for the first time in more than half a century, there's a new mission to the moon, NASA's Artemis program.

NASA is intending to launch a crew of astronauts around the moon this spring.

From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C.

And today on the global story, America is going back to the moon.

This time, China is on a similar mission

of its own. What does this new space race mean? And why are countries on Earth competing for a

piece of the moon? I'm Rebecca Morel and I'm the BBC's science editor.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us, Rebecca.

You are involved in this podcast called 13 Minutes, Artemis 2, about the Artemis 2 mission.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the series?

Yes. Well, this is a series that's going

to be covering every step along the way of the 10-day-long Artemis 2 mission from launch

through to the astronauts heading to the moon, through to them flying around the far side of

the moon and then coming back home again for splashdown. So it should be very exciting.

Okay. So Rebecca, you're heading off quite soon to Florida to go and see a lunar launch.

What are you expecting from that? And are you looking forward to it?

Well, I'm hugely excited about it. I mean, who wouldn't be, you know, the first humans to head back to the

moon in more than 50 years. And going to Cape Canaveral, the Kennedy Space Center, where we'll

see the launch, there's so much history, you know, embroiled in that place. It's where the

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