Far out! Man’s biggest leap yet, and the new space race to the Moon’s treasure.

Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show.

I'm Ted Bonnet and my trusty partner, Phil Proctor is somewhere in the ether.

Yeah.

There you are.

I'm sorry, but I was on the dark side of the moon, enjoying complete silence and no communication from the madness of Earth.

It was so nice.

I really kind of wanted to stay there forever.

But, you know, we are higher than usual this week.

238,000 Miles higher.

Moonwalking through NASA's Artemis program.

It's been a great and fascinating week.

I'll tell you, I was completely nerding out yesterday, watching all day as they flew around the Moon and now they're headed back already to Earth.

It's just so great.

I agree.

I was a teenager when we went back last time.

It's just so great to connect to that.

Especially what's going on here on this planet right now, which.

Being held hostage by Grandpa.

Angry Grandpa?

No, mad Grandpa.

He's as crazy as a loon.

Just this weekend alone.

Did you hear what he said to the kids during the the Easter egg hunt?

Oh, my God.

Hey, every egg that they found was cracked just like him.

Believe me, it's no yolk.

Are you done?

Never.

Yeah, that's it.

Yeah.

Bill, let's get off planet for an hour, shall we?

Let's just get out of here.

Beam me up, Ted.

Our guest today is Leonard David.

He's an old buddy from my space reporting days in Washington D.C. in the 80s.

He is still doing it.

He's a space journalist, an author, a man who's been reporting on humanity's off world ambitions for over 50 years.

He has written a number of books including Moon Rush, the New Space Race.

And he co authored Mission to Mars, My Vision for Space Exploration with Buzz Aldrin, the Second man on the Moon.

Leonard, you're a Space insider columnist for Space.com, and you've written for sky and Telescope Astronomy, Aviation Week.

You've consulted for NASA.

You served as Director of Research for the National Commission on Space, a US congressional White House study that appraised the next 50 to 100 years of space exploration.

So, Leonard, welcome.

And how have we been doing?

Well, I'm telling you, the older I get, a little bit more desperate I seem to be.

And I'm not going to let you off the hook on being bombastic because here on Earth we.

You can see what's going on militarily in a lot of different kinds of regimes, whether it's the sea, air, land, polar desert, and what people are not Paying attention to is the increasing military buildup in low Earth orbit.

And I'm not just talking the U.S. i'm talking China, Russia, a lot of other countries, and all the way out to cislunar space.

And so this posturing we have down here on the Earth is being mimicked in space.

So we're not off the hook on that theme.

The Apollo program was essentially a political program against the Russians in memory of John Kennedy to get to the moon first.

But we're in a very intense space race again with China this time, and.

Yeah, so that's why this rush to the moon.

Why are we in a space race with China?

And why does it matter at this point?

It's not political score, necessarily.

Well, it depends on who you're talking to.

I mean, clearly the new NASA administrator and President Trump have made it clear that we got to get back before China.

Reboot the moon, is what I call it.

You know, and China, I watch it pretty closely almost every day.

And it's not the easiest thing to, you know, you can't call them up and ask for public affairs over there and get a quote.

So you got to piece together what they're doing, and they don't hide much, but you got to piece it together.

And they're making a very aggressive lunar landing program for their own tychonauts.

And, you know, as we speak, there's three of those folks up in their own Chinese space station.

Things are moving along.

They're going to have a new resupply flight coming up.

They're going to be doing more modules on their space station, and they're testing out all the lunar hardware.

So they're making their own headway to put their own tychonauts on the moon.

Some people are paranoid, some people are not.

There may be.

I'm going to throw this out just because I'm trying to wrap my mind around it myself.

Back in the heyday of the space race, Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union president at the time, sat down and talked about could they do a cooperative thing at the moon.

Now Khrushchev said, yeah, no.

And their program kind of collapsed on itself to get to the moon.

And one wonders whether or not the window of opportunity to work with China and would they work with us on developing maybe a more fundamental lunar base.

You know, at some point, we're going to need each other because we're going to have a 911 call coming out of the moon, and it'd be nice to try to coordinate efforts.

You would think there's enough for everyone on the Moon.

Why should we extend our territorial instincts there?

We seem to be fixed on the south pole of the moon where it's been always dark.

And there might be large deposits of ice there, which water is essential to living on the moon.

Wait a minute, there's ice on the Moon?

My God, I thought they were just looking for immigrants down here.

Give it time.

Oh God.

One of the spoils of the moon is helium 3.

That's right.

That's right.

It's helium with one less neutron.

And it's very important in the production of quantum computers and chips.

And it costs $9 million a pound to produce it on Earth because it's extremely rare on Earth, but it's fairly common on the MO because it preserved what came off the sun and it's sitting there.

So the H3 deposits on the moon theoretically would be so valuable it would pay for the Moon program?

It could be, you know, but I tell you, it's kind of squirrely right now because why you need the data you need to get.

I mean we have inclinations that water ice is there in these, what I call sun shy craters that they never see the sun.

But the helium 3 thing, it really is an issue of infrastructure to mine helium 3 from the moon.

It takes a lot of infrastructure to even plow through a bunch of the Moon's surface to get that stuff, but it's there.

And one thing that you gotta watch at the end of the year, I'm not sure what the date is going to be, but the China is going to launch what they call the Shangi 7 robotic lander at the south pole.

And then they're going to follow in a couple of years after that with the Shangi 8.

And the two of them are meant to discern what's going on in the South Pole, look for resources, understand better what kind of water ice may be there.

And it is all prelude to them setting up what they call the International Lunar Research Station.

Ilrs, they pretty much pronounce where, what they want to do and how they're going to go about it.

And just the other day they've advanced one of the test parts of their program for lunar exploration.

And it seems to me that they clearly see NASA moving to a certain date and they're gonna do everything they probably can do to make sure they get there first.

Who knows, back in the 80s when we were both covering the space program, I had a chance to pretty much talk to everybody who walked on the moon and they did come back changed.

The human experience of going off planet to another planet certainly changed them.

And they had a greater appreciation for the fragility of Earth and the whole idea of wars and borders on the planet were invisible from.

And they came back changed.

And it was difficult for them to articulate that because these guys were like MIT scientists.

They were very left brain, like Ed Mitchell having the computer go down on descent to the moon.

You can't be looking out the window going, wow, you need to be completely focused.

But the flip side of that is that many of them came back in their 30s realizing they would never top that mission and were ill equipped to, to express the poetry of their experience and were frustrated by that, the notion of the human component of space travel.

I remember being at a lunch at the American Astronomical Society.

I was surrounded by hundreds of astronomers and they were so dismissive of the manned space program, saying, you know, they're taking all of our money.

We could do this for 10 cents on the dollar.

It's interesting that that hasn't ended.

What I noticed on the NASA feed yesterday, the public affairs people who are doing play by play for watching on YouTube or wherever, almost every 15 minutes you hear the same thing.

And this is something that could only be done with human eyes and human minds.

This is just something the robots can't see.

They can't do that.

They can't anticipate that.

And it got to the point where at least it was too much on the nose.

Is this because they're dealing with draconian budget cuts and terrible morale at NASA?

They lost 4,000 civil servants last year and they each had an average tenure of 20 years.

It was enormous brain drain.

And NASA now is facing, thanks to Trump, a 23% cut to its total budget and a nearly 50% drop in funding for its science division.

That's more than 40 projects being terminated.

As one person, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society in Pasadena, said, it's an extinction level event for science.

Or as I would say, NASA's in the cold, cold ground.

What's your take on it all, Leonard?

Well, there's a lot there.

I mean, I think, I think the first thing is, yeah, the space science and human exploration has always been a, you know, the hull rubbing experience.

They bounce off each other.

There's attempts to try to bring and coalesce the two together.

Space science, the classic line is always the last person on the moon.

Jack Schmidt was the scientist and it was all that part of the product of the space race back in the 60s produced good science once Jack got there.

And a lot of the trained astronauts, David Scott in particular, who he was an astronaut on one of the earlier Apollo missions, they all got trained in geology, but you know, they're test pilots and they want to make sure they stick to landing and hit it right on the nail.

The thing that's worrisome, the new budget just came out a couple days ago from the omb, the Office of Management and Budget.

And again, like you're saying, the budget cuts to space science is pretty severe and already arms are up and people are worried and this and that.

Jared, the new NASA administrator is in a position, frankly, I don't know, I don't want to speak for him, but he's got to embrace the Trump administration's budget cut because on one hand, the Artemis moon exploration program and the lunar base that we want to put it there, it's got a pretty good chunk of money now.

Also what got a lot of money is the Space Force.

It got a big boost in the numbers that they want for the Space Force.

What is the Space Force for people.

Who are not acquainted, the military in space warfare group that wants to make sure we don't get attacked, you know, the golden dome anti ballistic missile system that Trump wants to put in place.

There's a lot of finagling going on with that budget and a lot of it we don't know.

The Space Force apparently is poised for an 80% funding boost in the 27 budget.

This is like to replace Star wars from the Reagan era, right?

Yeah, to weaponize space, basically.

That's funny when you bring that up because I, I remember when Reagan gave a talk in the White House and I'm sitting there at home and also, you know, I kind of half baked attention on it.

And also he starts talking about Star wars and with some kind of shield system and.

Right.

And it was really surprising how that got enacted.

And Strategic Defense Initiative, or known as sdi.

Yeah, Space Defense Initiative.

And what has happened, if you're a Space Force advocate, technology has definitely moved ahead.

The plausibility of doing a layered defense and you know, even though it may be really super expensive, maybe in some corners more practical today than it was back when Reagan talked about it.

So.

Yeah.

Right.

Always keep an eye on that.

And the companies that are engaged in civil and military space contracting, the big ones like Lockheed Martin and Grumman and name them all, that's a lot of money.

They're going to be there.

They got all kinds of ideas.

They're Going to help you put in place whatever you want.

It was so controversial even back then, this idea.

I remember Edward Teller, who's considered the father of the hydrogen bomb, was a big advocate of sdi.

He was an odd one.

He walked around with a brick in his briefcase.

Did you know that?

Was.

He had a cane.

He was an odd one.

Well, wait a minute.

Why did he walk around with a brick in his suitcase?

Exercise, no briefcase.

And I didn't ask.

You didn't ask?

No.

It wasn't a brick of marijuana.

It was Edward Teller.

Wait a minute.

So you know Teller in Penn.

And Teller doesn't speak.

So is that his.

I remember how some of the astronauts were just appalled.

In particular, Edgar Mitchell, who was the sixth man on the moon, Apollo 14.

Probably the most intellectually interesting astronaut, in my opinion, at least of the ones I knew.

He was the one that did the remote viewing experiment from the moon.

He was considered insane by some of his bosses and colleagues.

They told me themselves, and I don't think he was at all.

He wrote a book back then, when the Foxes Guard the Hen House, and he said, what would a species outside Earth think of a species like ours who finally was able to evolve off the planet?

And the first thing they did was aim weapons back at itself.

Right.

It was not financially viable and it never happened.

Let me get back to something you mentioned I think is really important.

Frank White was the guy that really coined the term overview effect.

And you saw that in the 4 Orion, Artemis 2 crew.

There's definitely something that happens and they have a view of the Earth that very few have had.

And you can.

It's kind of in a full drive mode when you look out.

And yeah, it's a little hard for the robots to communicate that, but when you have humans doing it and crying at the same time, that is very powerful.

Now, how that reflects back here on Earth.

And I think it may for a lot of people, that's great.

That's a very important element of this.

And again, Frank White I've known for a long, long time, and I always hate him because any reporter or writer that can get something coined that has so much longevity, you.

Oh, God, I wish I would have.

Thought that we were talking earlier about the lack of poetry in the descriptions of the experience by the mainly heroic engineers from our country.

But in the Soviet Union, which the Russians are a very poetic people.

And I remember one of the things that stuck to me was that when Yuri Gagarin was among the first men in space, his first communique Back to the Earth was ya?

Are you all?

Which means I am an eagle.

That's always struck me what a beautiful thing to say looking down on the Earth from space.

I think one thing, you know, that we kind of again, forget because it's become commonplace, is you've got an International Space Station and you have cosmonauts there and U.S. astronauts and Japanese astronauts and a lot of other countries.

So international.

That's right, the International.

And you know, they come back with interesting and photographically interesting images of the Earth, indeed.

Things they worry about.

There's something about being in space that definitely drives the poetic license out of all of us to really try to communicate that back to other people.

Like you said, test pilots, they got a checklist and.

Right.

Unlike you, I've talked to a lot of astronauts and you know, some of them have an overview effect.

They're so busy trying to checklist what, you know, their orders that they got to do, they don't have a time to look out and to perceive what they're perceiving.

I interviewed one of the Apollo 13 astronauts and he was so cynical.

I mean, they almost died on that mission.

I don't think many people know just how dire it was for them.

And I said, well, you still got around the moon, which is actually close to the route that Artemis has taken.

I said, you must have looked out the window.

I mean, there must have been something great about that.

And he said to me, nah, space to me is just another few numbers on the altimeter.

I was like, oh, you poor bastard.

You went to the moon and you didn't even see it.

That's the way it is.

It's nice to see the euphoric nature of people getting reconnected with the moon through human eyes and their experience.

But we got a long way to go.

The way the Artemis program has now been rejiggered is going to be a real competitive thing of companies.

SpaceX, Jeff Bezos, Amazon the last time I looked, to get to the moon, you need a lander.

We don't have a lander.

There is no lander.

That's right.

And there's also no spacesuits for walking on the moon made yet.

They're having a rough go of it, but they may be out of the woods on that.

I don't know.

Again, Jared Isaacman has got to take off all that on, and it looks like he's doing a good job.

I just talked to an ex astronaut a couple days ago and she was really concerned about the timelines that he's projecting that it's one of those inter.

Miracle here kind of thing.

Because there'll be a problem.

They're going to be a snafu.

There will be an Apollo 13 type event.

There'll be something.

Well, it is a test flight in some ways.

Going around the moon the way they are is sort of a conservative move, even though they're accelerating the program fast.

People are comparing Artemis 2 to the Apollo 8 mission, which was the first mission that left Earth orbit to lunar orbit and then came back.

And Artemis 2 did not even do that.

They went what Apollo 13 had to do to get back, which was use celestial mechanics and gravity fields.

So they protected themselves with the Artemis to go out far like that because eventually the Earth would pull the crew back.

So even if their engine failed, they would have a much better chance of getting back to Earth because the moon and the Earth's gravity would keep it on course.

So that was a pretty conservative move, right?

Or what am I missing?

Yeah, no, you're right again.

Jared, the new NASA administrator has really tried to express the hope that there's a new cadence with these missions, that we can accelerate flights.

Because there was a several year delay between Artemis I and Artemis ii.

And some people claim that's why when they did the wet dress rehearsal with peels and everything on the launch pad for Artemis ii, things fell apart.

You got to keep the cadence going not only for the technology, but also the people, the mission control people, the astronauts, everybody that's involved in that.

And having the kind of a sluggish space program that doesn't have a every year kind of flight.

I mean, I'm a kid that went through Mercury and Gemini, particularly Gemini.

My God, they were launching like every hour.

I don't know, it seemed like I was watching, I was glued every flight.

And you know, we pulled off a lot of Gemini missions between the Mercury and the Apollo program that we're.

They were seminal.

That's what happens when you have a dead president that gave a deadline at the end of the decade.

That's really what kept it going in so many ways.

And that was an inspired movement at the time.

We're talking to Leonard David, our space journalist friend here on the Sexy Boomer show.

Let's nerd out a little bit on the technology.

I have been so amazed by the advancements in 50, what, three years of going to the moon.

I think one of the things that blew me away was that we were watching high definition television images of these folks going behind the moon with The Earth setting on the other side of the moon just before the signal cutout because it's line of sight.

They're using this brand new system called optical communication system.

It's a laser system, not that it would do any good, but there's no AT&T up there.

And it's out of the range of the gps, which is what the space station can use.

It's really out there.

So the only way they could get high definition signals was they're using lasers that send the information they're trying to get to like 110 megabytes a second of data speed.

That's amazing.

There's only three sites on Earth that are receiving these television signals.

White Sands somewhere here in California, and a test set up in Australia somewhere.

But just this optical comm system is astounding.

You know, Ted, I actually call it an optical con system because, you know, just as they faked the moon landing.

Yeah, yeah.

Really black and white, really cruddy slow motion.

Now we got CGI and all this laser technology.

It really looks real.

You know what's really cool too is the amount of data that's going back and forth is allowing real time science evaluation.

And they have this cool room down the hall from mission control in Houston called the science evaluation room.

It's a control room and it's just filled with scientists in real time talking to the crew and guiding them through their science and helping them analyze it.

This is all new.

This is pretty amazing.

This is like talking to Lewis and Clark in real life when they were out on the frontier.

There's so much to marvel at what's happening here.

The fact that NASA's only built seven spacecraft systems in all its history, including Mercury and, you know, Gemini and Apollo and Artemis system is only the seventh one.

And yet it went off on the first manned attempt.

I'm speculating that happened because the processing power and computational power that we have in 2026 allows for such sophisticated electronics and systems to be monitored in real time.

You don't have to stop and start so many.

Yeah, I do, I do want to point out here one thing that struck me that they were.

The rocket that lifted off was as tall as the Statue of Liberty and there were 8.8 million pounds of thrust that lifted it.

So I thought that really got her off.

Yeah, it's got to be a wild ride.

I was always worried, you know, that was the second flight of that, that vehicle.

And you know, you always worry about how the astronauts are being vibrated in there and what the, yeah, the launch.

Like I remember talking to Jack Schmidt, I think on Apollo 17, he said when that thing lit off I could, I, you know, we're looking at the instrument panel and it was shaking so much you couldn't read anything.

You know, like, I don't know, we're making progress.

Kind of an odd one.

I love the optical comm, but I think the one that got a lot of attention was the damn toilet.

Always, always like, you know, and actually the NASA administrator there has flown on Polaris flights and he had the same kind of problem with the toilet on SpaceX Dragon.

I think we need to have more attention to that toilet.

Toilets are really complicated in space because of so many different factors.

Mostly because of the freezing.

You see you have the exhaust vents for the urine right off the side of the ship, but because it's on the side of the sh, it's exposed to the extreme temperatures so it tends to freeze.

So they try to turn the spacecraft into the sun to try to melt it.

You know, a lot of this stuff you learn later because I think there's a good lesson learned here about what the astronauts go through that don't get reported until they're down back on Earth and they're retiring or whatever.

And that's a Starliner, you know, the Boeing Starliner, the two person crew on that.

Only just in the last few months or so you're hearing what they went through on Starliner with the doghouse motors and all the problems they had with the control.

That was a big deal.

So who knows what beyond toilets and how well the optical comm worked.

That's the purpose of the test flight of Orion, the life support system.

I heard temperature problems every once in a while.

Yeah, they were cold, they were cold, they were hot, they were this or that.

The human factors plays a giant role.

The other one that was a weird one was the space radiation issue of one thing that they can't perceive at launch.

What's going to happen?

Is the sun going to be nice to you?

Tossing out a solar storm that could irradiate the whole capsule in route.

That's an issue.

They thought about it.

They have what I call a pretty jury rigged response to that of stacking up storage bags and all kinds of stuff.

And being near the toilet area seems to be not a hotspot if there's radiation coming, you know, cosmic rays or protons from the sun.

So, you know, that's something we're going to have to be worried about not only en route to the moon, but if we get people down there for long term, beyond the Apollo 17, what they call long term, at that time, we're going to have to deal with some real interesting dynamics.

So what you're really saying to me is, are we supposed to do this?

Why don't we just stay here and solve the problems on our Earth?

Is that what we're being told by all of this?

What is the point of an outpost on Mars other than, you know, the great achievements for mankind?

What is the point of it?

Yeah, well, I think it's always been there since we started the whole space program.

I'm in the camp that I think human nature and the way we explore, we're outward bound at all times.

And I think the space program has allowed that.

And there are a lot of people, yeah, let's go ahead and stay down here and bomb everybody and you know, neutralize ourselves.

Elon Musk, hate him or love him, he is a multi planet species.

You're always worried about an asteroid that's going to come in and knock out Earth life.

Isn't it better to spread out?

The point to me that we got to watch for and it won't happen in my lifetime because I'm getting close to not being here.

What we're doing today is Wright brothers stuff.

It's amateur to me.

It's bailing wire and we're back in 1903 or something with the Wright brothers and a rail going down there trying to get 72 seconds of flight.

Things are going to change.

The way we blast people off and get into space is going to radically change in the decades to come when.

We can evolve beyond chemical propellant.

It'll.

Yeah, this is not going to be the way we're doing it.

I don't know what it's going to be.

Historically though, any predominant civilization that turned its back on the frontier declined.

And people saying, why are we going back to the moon?

Why don't we just go to Mars?

And I think people are not taking into consideration how different the two objectives are.

There is really no survivability for Mars at this point for human beings.

There's just too much radiation, there's too much time.

Those things have to be addressed.

Just going to the moon is a major safety risk.

And it's just a skip away compared to Mars.

I know Elon Musk wants to make that happen.

And the Moon is so interesting anyway because it's our space brother.

We were separated at birth by a cosmic collision.

We're connected.

It's this cosmic preservation of what we come from because we have tectonic plates, we have life on this planet.

All those initial structures on Earth are gone.

They've been covered up and changed.

The moon is us and it has been preserved because there is no tectonic shifting and there is no atmosphere.

There's so much to learn about Earth.

Well, isn't the premise to build a permanent base on the moon in order to facilitate a flight to Mars from the moon as opposed to from Earth?

Is that part of the plan or not?

It can be part of the plan, but I think the thing that's missing here is you gotta regain your space legs.

That's all I ever think of.

You gotta get back to the moon and do it in a routine manner.

And it'll fall then to nuclear power systems on the moon.

They're talking about and talking about even the human factors of having people cooped up in a environment on the moon.

How much headway are we going to get for a future Mars base?

Yeah, I just see the moon as a really stepping stone.

But you know, to what?

Mars is one thing, but if we're really clever, it's going to look.

Looks silly somewhere down the history book timeline.

Why do they even argue about.

It was obvious that he had to go there first and get on to Mars.

And then, then by, by the time they got fusion reactors and a lot of these other things, they're an interstellar civilization groping out among the stars.

So you can build up a nice little white robe case on why we're doing this.

And again, my mother used to tell me all the time, she says, you know, the Meeks will inherit the Earth, but the brave ones are going to the moon.

Oh, that's good.

There are really extraterrestrials out there.

Our reaching out to them.

Does that mean that it might make it more possible for us to communicate with an extraterrestrial consciousness and learn some more tricks about how to travel in space?

I mean these things.

I grew up on science fiction, right?

Yeah.

And so.

And now here it is in reality and it's, it's not as easy as turning a pay.

You're going on the assumption that if there is extraterrestrial life, that they live in our reality plane, that they're like we are in that respect.

It could be completely obtuse and abstract other dimensional.

I agree.

Creating a space base on the moon to get to Mars efficiency, if there is the makings of fuel there with water.

The biggest tax is getting off of Earth.

The amount of energy required to break free of the Earth is enormous in the time we have left.

Leonard, let's draw the scene.

We now have a robust commercial space landscape.

We have three major launch systems.

We have the Artemis, which costs something like $4 billion a launch and it's made up of shuttle parts.

It's kind of like it's a Frankenstein.

Yeah.

Compared to the Saturn V rocket, it has more thrust, but it's slightly shorter.

Just to give you a scale here.

The Saturn V had about seven and a half million pounds of thrust when it launched.

The Artemis has 8.8 million.

So it's a little bit larger.

SpaceX's Starship Super Heavy booster, which has 33 engines as opposed to five or six.

It produces approximately 16 to 17 million pounds of thrust, at least the iterations that they're planning and can put a payload of 250 to 300 tons in orbit.

That's incredible.

Now you have Bezos with the new Glenn, which is also designed to go to the moon.

And Bezos and Musk are the ones that are supposedly going to be building the moon lander for the Artemis program.

I mean it's so intertwined now the commercial and the business government aspect.

Well, you're right.

The private sector has really come the forefront and you've got champions like the two, you know, Bezos and Musk out there.

But a lot of other startups, space startups are probably since we started talking, we've 10 more startups in space have started.

They're all over the place with new ideas, new concepts, new technology that they can muster faster than even NASA does.

So yeah, NASA relying on them is good.

But I think we are at a little bit of a quandary because the first thing that Jared Isaacman, that NASA administrator did was to ask Bezos and Musk to accelerate their programs because they got too complicated.

The refueling in space thing is always one that's been brought up over and over again.

People not not big fans of that because we haven't done it, that doesn't mean it can't be done.

So we have yet to see what the accelerated plans of both companies will be.

Elon Musk is very creative and you know, my God, thinking about I was one of these guys that went out to New Mexico and saw the Delta Clipper get off the ground and the whole point of it was to re fly it really quick and now we got a lot.

It's a whole hum thing of bringing the first stage back to the land ocean.

So he's made a huge contribution and everybody's trying to mirror that.

So I don't know where it's going to go.

But the private sector is very important.

I think, you know, it would be amazing to me if we don't have problems.

And that's where the space race is going to get really squirrely.

And China could kill.

I, I can almost make a prediction.

They're getting cocky over there and you know, they could lose a crew like Russia has and the United States with the shuttle missions.

You know, how are they going to react to loss of life?

We got to get kind of ready for that.

And so it's going to get, it's going to be exciting.

And you know, I'm like you when we first started talking.

I'm 13 again, let's go.

You know, it sounds to me like we're all Bezos on this bus.

That's what makes it exciting is the risk.

Apollo 13, great case in point.

Thank God that explosion happened on the way to the moon because they had this lunar module still to get back to Earth with and that was all private industry.

Grumman on Long island built the lunar module and Rockwell out here in Whittier built the command module.

And a little known story that they had to use the lunar module's working engine systems to get back to Earth and then switch over into the dead capsule and land safely on the planet after the explosion.

And when that happened, Grumman, who built the lunar module, sent a towing bill to Rockwell for like A, for 253,000 miles of towing.

That's part of the excitement of it all.

And if you want to follow it, NASA.gov on YouTube has been doing a wonderful job.

And I'm sorry you said ho hum, and I get what you're meaning by that, but when I see boosters coming down next to each other from a heavy rocket booster landing at the same time, I still scream like a 16 year old.

Absolutely.

It's pretty amazing.

It is amazing.

Great stuff.

And you know, you can't discount a lawn.

He's got a passion and he's got a big pocket full of money and you know, they got everybody excited about the IPO that's coming or whatever the hell.

Yeah.

Trillions of dollars flooding into Space X or whatever Tesla or whatever it's going to be, but see how he spends it.

But I do think we're going to see problems, we're going to see success, partial success.

And you know, staying the course is always tough as Trump leaves and a new administrator comes in.

I think you have every right to think it's going to be a time and space politically to reevaluate how much money we're spending on the space program.

It gets back to the only one question, what's the value of all this?

I don't know what we're going to look like in about five or six years.

It's exciting.

It's always good to look up.

Our guest today, Leonard David, space journalist.

You can read his writings, which are all fascinating, at his website, leonarddavid.com Leonard, thank you so much.

That's been a lot of fun.

And you know, I'm with you.

Keep looking up.

There's a lot to look up out for in the future.

It's great.

Yep.

You're listening to Sexy Boomer show and you can hear all our shows@SexyBoomershow.com and on your favorite podcast platforms.

I'm Ted Bonnet.

I'm Phil Proctor.

So we'll meet again don't know where don't know when But I know we'll meet again some sunny day.