Hi listeners, Benjamin here, with another one of our check-ins on all things going on in the US.

This time we're looking at space exploration and space science and how these fields may be affected by the Trump presidency.

To find out, yesterday afternoon UK time, I spoke with Alex Witsy, who covers all things space for nature.

Alex, hi, how are you doing today?

I'm good. How are you?

Doing A.O.K. Thank you. Thank you for joining me.

You had an article this week looking at US President Donald Trump's challenge to NASA,

and that challenge is to land the first humans

on Mars. Before we get into it, let's get some background to this decision.

This is kind of an expansion of what Trump did during his first presidency. So back in 2017,

Trump said he wanted to send astronauts to the moon. And rather surprisingly, NASA has been working on a course to do that. The agency's

been sort of putting together a bunch of rockets and other equipment and other hardware to get

astronauts around the moon on a new rocket and down. And then sort of earlier this year,

Trump started making noises about Mars. So now Trump is kind of redoing what he did for the moon,

but he's saying he wants to go to Mars. He sort of hinted at this in his inaugural address, and he

hinted it at the state of the union. And then we had a budget rollout, which is where the pedal

hits the metal, so to speak. And there's words in there and some amount of money to kind of really maybe start thinking about

whether NASA might send humans to Mars. Because of course, this has been a long-term aim of NASA's

for, I mean, a very, very long time, but it seems like this is a concentrated effort he's calling

for. Yeah, I would say in the decades up in covering NASA, it's always

been sort of 20 years in the future that just keeps rolling forward. But this is probably the

most serious push in a while, and there's kind of a number of things that have enabled it,

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