There has been a lot of hype of late over the 21st century "space race", which pits some of the world's richest men - Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos - against one another in a contest to see who will pioneer a new age of space adventure. But as Nick Schmidle, journalist and author of the recent Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut discusses here, this is not just about space. There is machoism at play, and pressing questions over whose interests these men are serving: theirs and their wealthy customers, or humankind's at large?
A conversation about the marriage of extreme wealth and hubris, and what's next in "space tourism" and our exploration of the final frontier.
Hosts: Alice Bloch and Samira Shackle
Exec Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Danosongs
Image artwork: Ed Dingli
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Transcript:
Niki Seth-Smith:
Hello and welcome to With Reason, coming to you from New Humanist magazine and The Rationalist Association. We're all about exploring matters of reason and unreason, criticism and debate, all through conversations with writers and thinkers about their work and ideas. I'm Niki Seth-Smith, and I'm Samira Shackle. Now on here, With Reason, we like to focus on philosophy, culture and science. And we mean “science” in the broadest sense. In this series, we've heard from anatomist Alice Roberts about the significance of human burials through the ages, we've heard from data scientist Pragya Agarwal discussing motherhood and choice, and the brilliant physicist Carlo Rovelli has talked rather poetically about quantum mechanics, truths and the humbling power of science.
Samira Shackle:
Now that word “humble” probably isn't the first that comes to mind when you think about last year when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Virgin’s Richard Branson made history within days of each other by travelling beyond the Earth's atmosphere on spacecraft that their own private companies had built. So a lot has been made of the spectacle of these men's egos knocking together. But Niki, your guest today knows the story and the context to it better than most of us do. He's the journalist Nick Schmidle, and for his latest book, he's taking a really close look at contemporary space travel. I'll be listening in to this one. So I'll let you tell us more about Nick and I'll be back with you later for a catch up.
Niki Seth-Smith:
Thanks Samira. So, next, a journalist who writes for the likes of The New Yorker, the Atlantic and the Washington Post. And his first book was about his tumultuous years spent in Pakistan, so he clearly likes an adventure. In 2014, he started tracking the rise of Virgin Galactic. That's the American spaceflight company founded by Richard Branson and his British Virgin Group. His book, Test Gods, looks at that story and more, taking us into the work and lives of the people fuelling the new space race. It's a tale of genius, lunacy and optimistic evangelism that's really only just begun. But it's also personal for Nick. His own father was a fighter pilot, having attended Top Gun, that military school made famous in the 1986 Tom Cruise film. I asked what drew him to document the private space race, and why is it such an exciting field today.
Nick Schmidle:
I was drawn to the story and drawn to this sort of unfamiliar industry in some ways by a terrible tragedy, by the Virgin Galactic crash on October 31 2014. I remember getting the news alert. And looking at the framework like the nut graph of this news story and thinking to myself, wait a second, there's a company based in California owned by a British billionaire who lives on a private island that's flying winged rocket ships in the California desert, one of which just crashed and killed a test pilot. I was like, you know, I didn't even know, we were still, I didn't even know that there were test pilots still doing this sort of thing, never mind kind of in that, you know, in this industry and in this world. So that was what piqued my interest. And I went out there shortly after that, to explore what was possible for what became a very long magazine piece for The New Yorker. So that was kind of my entry into the world.
NSS:
So we'll get back to that crash a little bit later. But you say you weren't aware of what was going on in that private space race. But I think your father was a fighter pilot. And he even helped to train one of the men in your book who goes on to fly spacecraft for Virgin Galactic. So can you just tell me a bit about that connection, like did your father's profession lead you to an interest in in pilots initially.
NS:
So when I started writing for The New Yorker, just by sort of dint of accident the first two pieces that I did for the magazine were about the military. One was about a crazy court martial story in which the soldier had been tried three times for the same murder. And there were all these sort of interesting, legal questions about, double jeopardy, triple jeopardy, etc. So that was one piece. And the second piece was, I had sources inside of the Special Operations community and I had done this sort of talk about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden's compound. And I remember someone asking me if I considered myself a military guy at the magazine and I really resisted the categorization because I didn't, you know, I sort of imagined myself as like the crime guy who got to who stumbled into the bin Laden story, just started, you know, because I had the sources but that wasn't really what I was focused on. And in some ways, the Virgin Galactic story to me, yes, it felt familiar, but I had never been interested in aviation really, I was interested in a certain type of character and I felt like the test pilots who were flying these winged rocket ships in the California desert were those characters. But it wasn't really until I got out there that I both realised my dad's connection, and also, it took me a while. And when I say a while, you know, I worked on the project first as a magazine story for four years and, all told, the book for seven. And at one point, you know, I kind of had to stop and keep asking myself, what was holding my interest? And that in some ways, ultimately gets back to your question, which is that I realised that it was an opportunity for me to write about my dad, in a way that I had never thought was sort of doable. It always felt too direct and I wasn't sure how I could do that. And so suddenly, this, this was an opportunity for me to come at it from a different angle, for me to write about a world that I knew, because I'd grown up around sort of, you know, elite pilots, but that I had never studied per se. And look, truth be told, aviation in and of itself, I find it interesting, but not super, super interesting. I mean, I'm not like an aeroplane junkie. And it was always for me, it was the psychology of elite performers, whether they are navy seals, or whether they are, you know, investigators or whether they're test pilots. Like that's kind of the world that's always intrigued me. And that's, that's what ultimately brought me to this story.
NSS:
And it's also a world of risk and masculinity. And I guess, talking about the psychology of these men, and it still is mostly men I think people are focusing or have been focusing, especially last summer, on the man in charge as an Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos - as three of the world's richest men who've all founded these private space travel companies, and are competing in what seems to be a very sort of machismo kind of way to build up their businesses. But before we get back to your book, what do you make of all that? I mean, that SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, competing together and, you know, maybe some reflections on who's most likely to win, if you have any thoughts on that?
NS:
Yeah, sure. Well, yes, all three companies definitely run by sort of alpha men, run by billionaires, run by men who, in the case of Bezos and Musk particularly, kind of have everything that they could want here, like they've achieved, they've had such success as businessmen, here on Earth, that sort of space was both a challenge. And also, I feel like Jeff Bezos, his business empire has infiltrated and penetrated our lives to such an extent that, you know, it's really kind of uncanny. So that is unquestionably a factor, that's unquestionably a truth about who is leading this industry. For me, Richard Branson has never really been a big part of this story for me up until when he flew on July 11th. He doesn't spend a lot of time out in Mojave, California, his presence is kind of more like spiritual advisor than it is a CEO. I mean, he's not technically fluent. In fact, there's this curious legal prohibition on Richard Branson because the US Congress, I think, in the 70s drafted this piece of legislation that makes it illegal for US nationals to share technology or know how with foreign nationals that could be used for quote unquote dual purposes. So you know, rocket technology that could be, say, used to help an enemy government design a cruise missile. And so as a result of that, Richard Branson is actually legally prohibited from knowing the technical details of the rocket company that he founded. So his role is very much arm's length. And so he was always there. But in my eyes like it was an odd like presence and less of the guy on the shop room floor, which is how Elon Musk is and to a lesser extent, Jeff Bezos, from what I understand. There is a great deal of inherent sort of machismo and masculinity in these men trying to get there first in the case, you know, of the suborbital stuff, which is the contest. I mean, there are many different races. You sort of asked who's going to win. I mean, Elon Musk has for all intents and purposes won the space race, this new space race. He has now put well over 100 rockets into orbit. He has huge contracts with NASA. He’s the juggernaut here. Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are sort of fighting for the lesser spoils at this point, which is the suborbital space race. And they're just trying, they're trying to form companies that can shuttle tourists to the edge of space. And that's what we saw play out with the, you know, kind of back to back flights. And so yeah, that's it, but it is undoubtedly a male dominated world at this moment. But that's a reflection also of engineering schools. I mean, the engineering schools in the US, I think that in the female enrolment is like 20%, on average. So when you walk into the hangar at Virgin Galactic, you know, the women are, you know, terribly underrepresented. But that's a reflection also of the engineering schools that they're coming out of.
NSS:
So I'm very intrigued and amused by this description of Branson as the all is, you know, like the man behind the curtain, because in the book, he does seem this weird spectral presence who sort of, you know, is not there at all and he kind of pops up and sort of seems to steal all the glory and these big extravagant parties. And it puts me in mind of when Bezos and of course, Branson, you know, they both launch themselves into space within weeks of each other. But on that very same day that Bezos took his journey, the Federal Aviation Administration actually said that their going to space is not enough to make you an astronaut. So what is the new definition? And was that a bit of a sort of pointed comment for them to have made at that particular time?
NS:
Yeah, I was also quite intrigued by the timing and the nature of the comment right? So both of these companies, particularly Virgin Galactic, just because they've been more of a vocal record over the course of the last 20 years - Bezos and Blue Origin have proceeded much more quietly and deliberately in some ways, and like in some ways, ultimately the question for a prospective customer is “Who do you want? What do you want sort of taking your space?” Do you want the company owned by the guy who you know brands everything including you know Coca Cola and including cola and condoms and dresses in you know wedding dresses to promote his wedding line? Or do you want to go to space with the guy who guarantees is going to get your package at your doorstep in two days? And so, is you the difference between their two flights was stark. I mean, I thought the Virgin Galactic flight, you know, it was good - Stephen Colbert hosting, you had, you know, musical guests. It was flashy, it was showy. Whereas the Blue Origin flight was, in some ways, downright kind of boring. Like it was so dry, but I think they are offering a more reliable product and there are a lot of technical explanations for them for that. But it's not a project that I would want to have spent seven years writing about, you know. There it's automated. Like I said, it's a relatively sort of staid affair. Going back to your question though, but this is this is very much Branson style is to kind of swoop in for the big parties. And that tension, that disconnect, between the operational realities on the ground and in the hangar in Mojave, California, and now also in Spaceport America in New Mexico, of the actual engineers and technicians and pilots who are who are operating these vehicles. And the disconnect between that reality and the marketing sort of razzmatazz, sort of smoke and mirrors side of the company that is trying to sell tickets is stark, and it is in some ways, I think, the company's own greatest threat, which is this central identity. It wants to be a luxury brand catering to the rich and famous, but it is still very much an experimental flight test programme. And they want to make the programme sound like it is an obvious next step for those who have everything here on Earth. But it's still an extraordinarily, you know, risky and dangerous and ultimately untested vehicle.
NSS:
You've maybe pointed to its experimental nature, and there seems to be a bit of tension between just being a tourism business for extremely wealthy individuals. But also, you know, being perhaps on the cutting edge of science, or at least, doing these research flights and Virgin Galactic makes these claims that they're opening up space to two scientists or more scientists, then you know, we'll be able to reach space. So can you tell me a little bit about that side of the operation. Are those sort of claims valid, that they're really interested in research?
NS:
So, how interested they are, how much that is a corporate priority is unclear. So I meant to sort of break that out in a few things. I think that technological advancements inevitably will come from companies that are exploring and experimenting with new technologies, right? So we don't know what might emerge or grow out of Virgin Galactic suborbital tourism company. And its usage of a hybrid rocket motor. Generally and traditionally you have liquid rocket engines and solid rocket motors. So that's either solid fuel or liquid fuel, and Virgin Galactic uses a hybrid of the two. Historically there are very few programmes that have used a hybrid rocket motor so you know, their ability to sort of harness this technology potentially opens up new opportunities that we just don't know what they are, but as I can tell, they're doing this to sell tickets. They're doing this to sell tickets to people who can afford originally $250,000 reservation and now, as of a few weeks ago, for those looking to sign up in the coming years. A $450,000 reservation, that's what they're here for. That's why Branson made the company, is not because he's interested in science for science’s sake, and not because as they also claim he's interested in quote unquote democratising space. Like, yes, if more people become astronauts as a result of their programme then they are sort of, you know, I guess they're democratising in that sense. But this gets back to your question about the FAA, which I didn't answer, then that is that Virgin Galactic has made that a marketing point for the past two, almost two decades now, that you will be an astronaut if you fly with us. And the way that they've in some ways kept customers interest over the course of the past 17 years is with inducements to, you know, to go on trips and give them you know, little business cards that say, future astronaut and things like that. And suddenly, for the FAA to say, hold on, we're not just going to be handing out astronaut wings to everyone who can afford a seat, you have to actually do something that contributes to research or science. Yeah, I think that that, you know, potentially sort of may have deflated some of the heft of the marketing sell that they and Blue Origin probably were planning to make. And I think that's what's so intriguing and fascinating about this company, and in this world, are that tension between the real sort of engineering stuff, and the more, you know, the more vapid, if you will, kind of rhetoric about what they're going to do in the process of making rich people, space tourists.
NSS:
And we'll go into that more gritty behind the scenes stuff in part two, but just what you've been saying leads on to I guess, the big question that people started really asking, you know, with those Bezos and Branson flights, is that is it? Is this worth it? Because there's an argument that given the climate crisis, we should really be focused on saving our planet, rather than sending people into space, which of course generates a lot of pollution. So I mean, what would you say to that? Are there any other counter arguments worth considering? And maybe we can look a bit beyond Virgin Galactic to that because as you say, Musk's project and Bezos, is there a little bit more focus on that space exploration side?
NS:
Yeah, totally. I mean, I think I don't have the data right in front of me, but SpaceX, Elon Musk's venture, they have lowered the cost, the launch costs; essentially what it takes to get a pound or a kilogramme of cargo into space, whether it's a satellite or whether it's to supply the International Space Station, they have lowered that cost significantly and by allowing larger satellite deployments you're providing internet access to previously uncovered areas of the world. I think that's important. I think that's really significant. And I think that your offering, you know, whether it's clarity of phone service, or its clarity of GPS services, that's real science, and I think that they are doing that. And I think that they are also looking beyond and you know, in terms of the deep space exploration, Elon Musk has always made it clear from the get go that everything for him is a step along the way to ultimately colonising Mars. I have heard Branson express what his quote unquote hopes and dreams are. And there was in 2016 as Virgin Galactic was unveiling its newly built spaceship after the 2014 crash, there was a reporter asked the very question you're sort of asking now, and Branson said he had just come back from Washington and he was meeting with a senator. And he was telling this senator that Virgin Galactic after they sort of master the space tourism thing that they're going to look deep, and they're going to start thinking about how they can, you know, zap asteroids and things like that. And I was like, talk about putting the cart before the horse. Yeah, we're light years away from that. And so I have never heard though, a long term, sort of deep space exploration argument or seen any documentation of any initiatives of Virgin Galactic. I think the goal was always to, you know, to create the space tourism company. So it's a long winded way of saying, Yes, on the Elon Musk stuff. Bezos is also trying to build a lunar lander. There are scientific priorities there. I don't know that they are as present with Virgin Galactic programme.
NSS:
Thanks, Nick. Now we've got a handle on where we're at and the new space race and a bit we'll go back to look at the lives of the people that make it happen. A word now from our producer Alice.
Alice Bloch:
You're listening to With Reason from New Humanist magazine, where Niki here is deputy editor. And If you like what you're hearing, press pause and click subscribe in the app you're using to listen to this. It costs nothing and helps us to make more episodes that are free for you to enjoy. And remember, you can get 50% off the price of an annual subscription to the magazine. If you head to new humanists.org.uk/subscribe and enter the offer code WITHREASON. With that for just £13.50 you'll get four print editions of New Humanist through your door each year. It’s beautifully made, expertly edited and won't leave you drowning amid stacks of magazines that you never read. Perfect, back now to Niki and Nick Schmidle on the 21st century space race.
NSS:
So Nick, Test Gods has been compared to that classic work of 70s New Journalism, Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, which documented the lives of NASA's test pilots and astronauts. But this seems to be the first major work to focus on private space companies. Why do you think it's been such a neglected subject?
NS:
Partially because access has been very difficult. It is hard because of the corporate priorities and because of the competition. These companies have been understandably reluctant, wary of letting outsiders in, of letting reporters in that they don't know and don't trust. There was a great book that came out about SpaceX just this spring called Lift Off that does sort of get into the early SpaceX stuff but you know when I say early it's, you know, when SpaceX was launching rockets off this missiles sort of you know, crazy James Bond villain stuff they had. They had this this island in the middle of the South Pacific in which they were launching rockets. There were anecdotes of rockets going up in the air and then turning around and like coming straight back down, and everybody's scattering and then them having to, you know, don scuba gear to recover parts from the coral reefs. I mean, that's pretty crazy stuff. But following the kind of day to day travails of these companies has been really difficult for all those reasons. I mean, these people are, often the employees are covered and covered by NDA, etc. So it's been, I think it's been a challenge. When I went to Virgin Galactic on behalf of the New Yorker, initially, I said, I want to write about the programme. But we want real real access. My editor said, you know, only we're only interested if we can get real access. And by that, we meant that we wanted to watch them work. We didn't want a sort of Richard Branson led dog and pony show in which I show up in Mojave, and I spent a day there and he, you know, I do a couple of interviews, and then the piece ends inevitably with a quote from Richard Branson saying, “You know, hopefully next year is going to be the big year like we wanted”. We wanted there to be something real to see and real to report. So I mean, it was my timing was fortuitous, the company had just had this horrible crash and I said, I want to watch you all do the work, I wanted to watch them kind of rise from the ashes and see if they could build another spaceship and make a go of this as a company. They had flown three previous rocket-powered test flights. The fourth one is the one that crashed and I said, I want to stay with you until you fly the fifth rocket flights I want to watch you build a new ship, put it through a flight test programme, and get back to where you were - essentially the day of the morning of the crash on October 31 2014. And so I went in, and we thought that was going to be maybe 18 months, maybe two years. And it ended up being four years. And once you're in a company like that, once you're in anywhere as a reporter, you know, you try and take advantage of that access and make it so that when the access ultimately comes to an end, you can continue to report.
NSS:
On that crash that seriously injured the pilot, and it killed the co-pilot Michael Ellsbury, there were accusations at the time, and the investigation later found that there were inadequate safety procedures and a lack of rigorous oversight. Can you just comment on this idea that maybe private profit-driven companies are more likely to cut corners? Or would you say that that was an accident that could have just as easily happened at NASA and that, you know, these flights are risky by their very nature?
NS:
It's a great question. I would find it very hard to think that that kind of accident could have occurred at NASA in 2014. Could that kind of accident have occurred at NASA in the early 60s when they were charging hard to try to beat the Soviets into space? Yeah, totally. I think it would be much more likely. But I think that as a result of the layers upon layers of bureaucracy, and therefore risk aversion that have crept into NASA, it is very hard to imagine that a pilot committing the kind of error that Mike Ellsbury unfortunately committed that morning, that there would have been what they call a single point failure on a NASA vehicle that would have allowed a single pilot mistake to have led to the crash.
NSS:
So we've talked a little bit about that heroism of astronauts. Obviously, they're dealing with this risk, and it seems a good time to mention a piece from the New Humanist archive that speaks to that. So this piece is called In Praise of Astronauts by Paul Sims, and it was about Chris Hadfield. So Hadfield, this NASA astronaut who built up a huge cult following after broadcasting from the International Space Station starting in 2012. And that piece notes that while they might be held up as these national heroes most astronauts seem to understand that their work transcends their own individual success or that of their country and see it as instead being for the benefit of all humankind. Did the astronauts you spoke to a Virgin Galactic share that same kind of spirit?
NS:
No, I mean, that's a highfalutin high-minded appraisal of one's contributions. I think I'm not diminishing that. I'm not suggesting that Hadfield or any of the other any other astronaut doesn't. I'm not questioning the integrity of the statement. But what I think and what drew me to the project was Mark Stuckey who's the test pilot who I really profiled in the book. Stuckey’s quest to become an astronaut first through NASA later through Scaled Composites where he was the test pilot there and then ultimately with Virgin Galactic - you know, this was a personal goal that he had been chasing since he was a kid. He had in the process lost his family lost friends. And you know it for me, it was like a bigger story. It was a story about family and about fatherhood and about what we're sort of willing to give up in order to chase those dreams and whether in some ways it's kind of worth it in the end. And his willingness to open up himself and his, you know, his files and his email inbox in his house, and a lot of painful memories of you know, him being estranged from his children after a really nasty divorce. And that, to me, that level of intimacy and grittiness and reality was something that I never, but it was unfamiliar from other astronaut profiles. And so that's in some ways what I appreciated and I think what drew me to him, he felt real. He was doing this because it was something he'd always wanted to do. And you know, ultimately when he became an astronaut, and he flew the successful mission and I spent that evening with him, we went back to his house and he opened up an expensive bottle of whiskey and it was, you know, he and I and his wife, second wife, and I was like, well so you know, what do you think? You know, is it is it everything you sort of hoped it would be? And you know, there's a little bit of a shrug and he was like, ‘Yeah, it's pretty cool’. But like, you could tell that it hadn't changed his outlook radically but um, you know, it was it was it was good for him. I'm sure he was incredibly relieved and proud and satisfied but you know, I think this was a personal quest and, you know, many of us are all sort of on these you know, personal quest and his willingness to get real was what was ultimately kind of what held my interest for all these years.
NSS:
And is it right that your father trained Stuckey at Top Gun, the elite fighter pilot school?
NS:
So both my dad and Stuckey are Top Gun graduates but my father was an instructor at the dogfighting school. All marine fighter pilots go through the school in Yuma Arizona, where you learn how to be a fighter pilot and my dad was an instructor there when Stuckey was a student there. They overlapped in time. They may have sort of been in some seminars together, they may have flown together once or twice but my dad wasn't schooling Mark in the ways of being a Top Gun student. They then diverged and went very different ways and Stuckey stayed in the Marines for another 10 years or so and then and then went to become a NASA test pilot and then the Air Force, and then ultimately got involved with the Virgin Galactic programme. My dad stayed in the Marines and eventually became a three star general and head of all aviation in the Marine Corps.
NSS:
You use Test Gods in part to explore some of your attitudes to masculinity, which is as much to do with your relationship with Stuckey and the other pilots as your reflections on your relationship with your father. Can you just comment on that and maybe also just on the general macho culture of pilots?
NS:
Yeah, it is a macho culture and it's potentially why I I'm not a pilot. I was back in the States last month and was at a wedding and my dad my brother, my cousins my uncle - every male above the age of 10 and below the age of 70 in my family has served in the military in some way shape or form and I haven't. I'm interested in that world but it's not like it's my world. But one of the things that I wrestled with as I started writing the book was appreciating what it was I got from my dad when I was growing up. In some ways I rebelled against that, I resisted, but there was always this notion when I was growing up that you know, my dad was a fighter pilot and is a has a PhD in philosophy and lectures at the Sorbonne and also raced motorcycles and growing up in his there was never a question of could you do something you wanted to do, it was like No, just put one foot in front of the other and do it. But also my dad was not around very much. There was a little bit of physical distance and an emotional distance. And I remember a few years ago thinking, alright, what how do I give that to my children? How do I get that too? I have two sons that are 10 and seven, how do I sort of inspire them? I am around more often, much more often than my dad was but so how do I sort of set that role model? How can I inspire but how can I also sort of be present and you know, in comfort and I don't think that I you know, I didn't come away with a golden answer to it. We were on a road trip in California and Virgin Galactic conducted its second spaceflight attempt. And I was able to bring my kids and was able to watch that flight with them on the flightline. And, you know, it was sort of life changing, I think for them and for me to be able to share that moment with them. And so that ultimately is what the book was, it was an exploration of relationships between fathers and sons and it's an exploration of masculinity. But it's not sort of an exploration of the traditional sort of hard-knuckled masculinity necessarily and it's all of us kind of trying to find what kind of man what kind of father what kind of son we want to be and so writing about test pilots was a way into that story, was kind of a vehicle to tell that story. But ultimately, I think the story is bigger than a story about test pilot or astronauts or certainly about, you know, a single company,
NSS:
Nick Schmidle, journalist and author of Test Gods. Thank you so much for joining us.
NS:
Thanks for having me. It's been fun.
NSS:
So I'm back now with Samira, who has been listening along to the conversation. So I learned a lot from talking to Nick and he did mention Musk's goal to land humans on Mars, but we didn't get much chance to talk in depth about that, or about Space X’s contract with NASA to land astronauts on the moon by 2024. And I just I just wondered what you thought about all that?
SS:
Yeah, 2024 seems like quite an arbitrary target, I thought as I was reading about it. Apparently this was set in the Trump era as he'd hoped it would be the crowning glory on his second term, obviously didn't work out like that. But I thought that was a reminder of how space travel’s still so intimately tied to this idea of national glory and so on. Even if the space race seems to be shifting to one that's predominantly being fought between billionaires, rather than this competition between nation states as it was in the Cold War era. I guess it's still, even though you have these kind of big masculine egos vying with each other, you still do have a sense that we're in which space exploration, you know, refracts back on to our national politics.
NSS:
Yeah, you imagined that there has to be some tensions there between the aims of these sort of billionaire individuals and of government programmes, Musk said that he wants to colonise Mars as a self-sustaining civilization. And he said various things in various speeches, basically, about preserving our species from different disasters. He's mentioned the advent of World War Three and described Mars as a backup plan. So it seems it seems a little bit bizarre that he's working with NASA to be honest.
SS:
Yeah, I guess it's indicative of how much the dynamics of space travel have changed. So I wonder if it's NASA losing its total monopoly on space travel, but I guess those in favour of the move would make the same arguments that are always made about private public partnerships. So just the idea of bringing efficiency and competition to the space sector and bringing down the cost of space travel, and so on, which it does seem that that Musk's company has done. I don't know, I guess as you allude to, it does just seem there's a big gulf between the quest for scientific knowledge and so on that that is NASA's mission statement and the idea of billionaires wanting to colonise other planets or flog tickets to other planets.
NSS:
Yeah, and I get your point about the private public partnerships, but it did, did put me in mind at that just absolute contrast between those sort of the ego driven progress and say what Carlo Rovelli was saying in the context of quantum mechanics, you know, just his point that, that sense of, you know, mystery and humbleness and discovery and uncertainty, just all of those being really primary kind of driving forces of cutting edge scientific inquiry. So yeah, it just couldn't be a bigger contrast there. Okay, so that's it from us today. But remember, you can listen back to past episodes like the Carlo Rovelli one, whenever you like, on whatever app you use, and if you hit subscribe, you'll have them delivered straight to you when they're ready.
SS:
And that's it too for series three of With Reason. You've been listening to me Samira Shackle and to Niki Seth-Smith. Our executive producer and fellow presenter in other episodes is Alice Bloch. And our sound engineer was Dave Crackles. Take care and we'll see you soon. Thanks for listening.
Further reading:
'Test Gods: Tragedy and Triumph in the New Space Race' (2021), Nicholas Schmidle
'The Right Stuff' (1979), Tom Wolfe
'In Praise of Astronauts' (2013) Paul Sims for New Humanist magazine
