Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center,

episode 321, Where to Land on the Moon. I'm Gary Jordan. I'll be your host today.

On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts all to let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight and more.

NASA is returning humans to the moon in a sustainable way with Artemis missions.

The work we do will set the course for a future of

humans on the lunar surface, conducting science investigations, testing critical

technologies, and catapulting our knowledge of deep space missions to prepare for human missions to Mars.

Now what may not seem so apparent is what landing on the moon really means.

Okay, so you're going to land on the moon, just go. But not surprisingly,

it's a lot more complicated than that for a variety of reasons. But one reason,

which we'll discuss in this episode and shouldn't be too surprising because it's

the title of the episode and you probably saw

it when you started this episode is where to land location location location.

There are a number of factors to consider from the chances of successfully landing a spacecraft to the

sustainable nature of successfully landing a spacecraft to the sustainable nature of future

operations to the interesting science that you can conduct on the surface.

For the science part in particular this has become more apparent to me

after having a number of

conversations about moon geology on this podcast. The moon isn't just one

homogenous rock. Each location under consideration has an interesting story

to tell.

And of course one major item here is when you start getting closer to the poles,

...