Hello, I'm Rory Stewart, and I'd like to tell you about an intelligent squared event

I'm doing with the classicist author and broadcaster Mary Beard. Together we'll be discussing

politics and power from the Caesars to Sunack, who gets to Winpar, who is excluded,

does power always corrupt, or other examples of leaders who've maintained their integrity while

an authority. And how does the nature of power vary across different times and cultures?

These are just some of the questions that Mary and I will be trying to answer.

In person tickets are now sold out, but you can still watch online on the 13th of November

at 7pm BST. Put your questions first live as we discuss power and politics down the edges.

Hello podcast listeners, I'm Connor and welcome to this Friday episode of Intelligent Squared.

Today we're joined by Nicholas Schmiddle. He's the staff writer at the New Yorker and author of

the new book Test Gods, Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut, and in conversation

with Helen Chersky, he discussed the new space race from Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic

to Elon Musk's Space X. They discussed the astronauts, engineers and billionaires,

trying to make civilian space travel a reality. It's a really fascinating conversation,

and if you do enjoy it, you can find a link for Nicholas's book in the podcast description.

But now let's go to the episode. Hello and welcome to this Intelligent Squared

event with me, Helen Chersky. Now, many of us dream of going into space, but in order to get there,

you need some pretty specialized vehicles, and there is a risk to life which might be hard to

quantify these days, but it's definitely not zero. And until recently, the only sort of method

model we had for getting into space was huge government funded programs, you know, with all this

national prestige and pride being state on their success. And so today we find ourselves in this

kind of awkward gap between, you know, low earth orbit being actually pretty routine for a national

...