The Next Astronauts Prologue

How It Happened

Axios

Politics, News, History

4.8 • 4.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2021

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In How it Happened: The Next Astronauts, Axios space reporter Miriam Kramer follows the first space flight to orbit without professional astronauts. Kramer will take listeners inside the story of the Inspiration4 mission, which SpaceX aims to launch on September 15. The podcast will chronicle the selection of these four civilians and their training at SpaceX headquarters. Kramer will go behind the scenes, bringing listeners into conversations with the crew as they grapple with challenges, the risks inherent in space travel and preparing their families for the launch. The mission has high stakes for the crew and for SpaceX, but it's also pivotal for the industry and could influence the future of private space travel. First, in this prologue, Kramer brings listeners into the current moment for the space industry and why so much is riding on this particular mission. Credits: The Next Astronauts is reported and produced by Miriam Kramer, Amy Pedulla, Naomi Shavin, and Alice Wilder. Dan Bobkoff is Executive Producer. Mixing, sound design, and music supervision by Alex Sugiura. Theme music and original score by Michael Hanf. Fact checking and research by Jacob Knutson. Alison Snyder is a managing editor at Axios and Sara Kehaulani Goo is Executive Editor. Special thanks to Axios co-founders Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz.

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0:00.0	Prologue. Hi, I'm Miriam Kramer. I'm the space reporter at Axios and I'm the host this season
0:07.4	of How It Happened. We'll get to what's coming in a moment, but before that, I need to talk about
0:13.0	what's been going on, which is a new era of spaceflight. You're probably hearing more about space
0:20.8	right now than you have in the last decade or so. There was the triumphant return of human spaceflight
0:26.2	launches from US soil last year. And for the first time ever, a private company is about to
0:31.1	launch people into orbit. And then this summer, just a few weeks ago with Richard Branson,
0:36.4	the billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic. Now the first person to reach the edge of space
0:41.5	in his very own spacecraft. You have Jeff Bezos' blue origin. Bezos takes flight aboard his new
0:47.4	shepherd's spaceship. I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because
0:55.9	you guys paid for all this. Really, I got to say it's a little concerning that all of a sudden
1:01.5	every billionaire is in a race to leave Earth. 2021 has been what I would call an exceptional year
1:08.0	in space. I have never seen anything quite like this. Space X plans to fly its first civilian
1:14.8	crew into space later this year. But this didn't just come out of nowhere. It's been developing in
1:20.3	the background for years. I started covering space in 2012, about a year after the end of the
1:26.4	space shuttle program. Space shuttle spreads its wings mental time from the start of a sentimental
1:31.3	journey into history. Even before the space shuttle landed for the final time, there were private
1:38.0	companies waiting in the wings, looking for new ways to take more people to space. The rise of
1:43.3	these private companies has allowed them to propel space forward in ways that only nations were
1:48.9	able to before. It's going to be exciting because you're seeing the rise of commercial space flight,
1:53.8	but at the same time, there were people rooting for Jeff Bezos not to come back. This is not just
1:59.6	good or bad. This is a very complicated time in space. But I've been paying attention to another
2:08.7	mission this year. It's called Inspiration 4. Four private citizens on a chartered space
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