# Episode 3: Planet B

An episode of [X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1591294233), 28 Mar 2025, 28 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/7baa5b/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/9ddbff87-9c8e-4291-8af5-ae39004e9df1/4aac4895-c05d-4190-8b7b-b2ad010d87dc/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=280ddf4f-6be5-4bd2-8d4d-ae39004e9dfa

Elon Musk is a rocket man. He wants humans to become ‘a multi-planetary species’ and talks about establishing human settlements on Mars. As President Trump talks up the Mars program while dismantling aid initiatives around the globe, Jill Lepore traces how Silicon Valley's existential catastrophism led to Musk’s extraterrestrial vision of capitalism. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin.
[0:20] Speaker 2: You are looking at a live view of the Falcon Heavy.
[0:24] Speaker 3: In twenty eighteen, Elon Musk's company SpaceX launched a rocket
[0:29] Speaker 3: from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida under blue skies
[0:32] Speaker 3: streaked with clouds. A giant white rocket attached to two
[0:36] Speaker 3: smaller white boosters stood perched on the launch pad.
[0:40] Speaker 4: All systems are Golfer launch.
[0:43] Speaker 3: A crowd assembled at mission control giddy and loud. This
[0:46] Speaker 3: was the company's splashiest launch yet of its biggest rocket
[0:50] Speaker 3: built for a Mars crossing orbit.
[0:53] Speaker 2: Stacked inside the firing is Elon's cherry red Tesla Roadster.
[0:57] Speaker 3: Then there was the payload described by SpaceX in its
[1:00] Speaker 3: live broadcast.
[1:01] Speaker 2: And inside of it a passenger. His name is Starman,
[1:04] Speaker 2: but don't worry, he's not human.
[1:06] Speaker 3: There was also an arc, a sort of Noah's ar
[1:09] Speaker 3: Ark of an archive on a space Proof Courts compact disc.
[1:13] Speaker 2: On the arc that's being launched today. The Foundation has
[1:16] Speaker 2: stored Isaac Asimov's classic sci fi series, the Foundation Trilogy.
[1:20] Speaker 3: One objective of this test flight was to put a
[1:22] Speaker 3: Tesla Roadster carrying the works of Isaac Asimov into orbit
[1:27] Speaker 3: for a billion years.
[1:28] Speaker 5: Three two.
[1:46] Speaker 3: Welcome to x Man The Elon Musk origin story.
[1:50] Speaker 5: I'm Jill Lapour.
[1:51] Speaker 3: I'm a professor at Harvard. I'm a US political historian,
[1:55] Speaker 3: and for a long time I've been studying the relationship
[1:57] Speaker 3: between technological and political change. I'm fascinated by visions of
[2:02] Speaker 3: the future in political discourse, in literature and science fiction, and.
[2:07] Speaker 6: Even comic books.
[2:11] Speaker 3: The series, I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism, call
[2:15] Speaker 3: it Muskism, extravagant extreme capitalism, extra terrestrial capitalism, where stock
[2:22] Speaker 3: prices can be driven by dreams and fantasies that come
[2:25] Speaker 3: from science fiction. Last episode, I looked at Musk's early
[2:32] Speaker 3: life in South Africa, growing up rereading The Hitchhiker's Guide
[2:36] Speaker 3: to the Galaxy. He ended up in Silicon Valley in
[2:39] Speaker 3: the nineteen nineties, founding a company called x dot com
[2:42] Speaker 3: that merged with PayPal. eBay bought PayPal for one point
[2:46] Speaker 3: five billion dollars. Musk use that money to start SpaceX.
[2:51] Speaker 3: He also started talking about very big plans for the
[2:55] Speaker 3: future of humanity.
[2:57] Speaker 7: When I was in the university, I thought about what
[3:00] Speaker 7: would most affect the future of the world, and the
[3:03] Speaker 7: three areas that I came up with the Internet, sustainable energy,
[3:06] Speaker 7: and making life multiplanetary.
[3:09] Speaker 3: Musk began to argue that his plan was to save
[3:12] Speaker 3: the human race, including by going to Mars. But why
[3:17] Speaker 3: future of humanity questions used to belong to religion and philosophy.
[3:22] Speaker 3: Under Muskism, they belonged to engineering an entrepreneurship. How did
[3:27] Speaker 3: that happen? This episode of X Man is called Planet
[3:33] Speaker 3: b strap in to head to Mars, which is where
[3:36] Speaker 3: Elon Musk was headed before he took a detour to
[3:39] Speaker 3: the White House. In twenty sixteen, the year Donald Trump
[3:43] Speaker 3: was elected president for the first time, Musk spoke to
[3:46] Speaker 3: an audience at a SpaceX event about the ship he'd
[3:49] Speaker 3: like to take to Mars.
[3:50] Speaker 7: I think like maybe the name of the first ship
[3:53] Speaker 7: that goes to Mars. My current favorite is Heart of
[3:56] Speaker 7: Gold from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I
[4:00] Speaker 7: like the fact that it's driven by infinite improbability. I
[4:03] Speaker 7: think ourship is also extremely improbable.
[4:07] Speaker 3: One pretty useful way of understanding Tusk's vision for SpaceX
[4:10] Speaker 3: is that it's Douglas Adams fan fiction. Or you could
[4:14] Speaker 3: make a fair argument that SpaceX's inspiration comes from the Foundation.
[4:18] Speaker 8: Series titlely Foundation author Isaac Asimov Encyclopedia Galactica one hundred
[4:29] Speaker 8: and sixteenth edition.
[4:32] Speaker 3: This Encyclopedia Galactica runs through all the Foundation Series, and
[4:36] Speaker 3: if that sounds familiar, that's because the Hitchhiker's Guide is
[4:40] Speaker 3: a lampoon of it.
[4:41] Speaker 6: The Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the Great Encyclopedic Galactica
[4:46] Speaker 6: as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom because,
[4:50] Speaker 6: although it has many omissions contains much that is apocryphal
[4:54] Speaker 6: or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older,
[4:58] Speaker 6: more pedestrian work in two important ways. First, it is
[5:02] Speaker 6: slightly cheaper, and second, it has the words don't Panic
[5:07] Speaker 6: inscribed in large friends letters on the cover.
[5:11] Speaker 3: That Tesla roadster that must send up into space had
[5:13] Speaker 3: a copy of Asimov inside, and it also had don't
[5:17] Speaker 3: Panic on its dashboard. Asimov's Foundation Series revolves around a
[5:22] Speaker 3: scholar named Harry Selden on.
[5:26] Speaker 8: Nine hundred and eighty eight years of the Galactic Ealing
[5:29] Speaker 8: died twelve thousand and sixty nine. Birthplace heliconnor of TOWARDUS sector.
[5:36] Speaker 3: Harry Selden is responsible for the future of humanity. His
[5:40] Speaker 3: plan engineers will save us. Selden knows that the Galactic
[5:44] Speaker 3: Empire will soon collapse, after which the galaxy will endure
[5:47] Speaker 3: a dark age. He's got a plan to hide away
[5:50] Speaker 3: two sets of experts, one at each end of the galaxy,
[5:53] Speaker 3: the two Foundations, to store the knowledge of civilization. Elon
[5:58] Speaker 3: Musk read the story as a kid, and later said
[6:00] Speaker 3: that the lesson he drew from it was that you
[6:03] Speaker 3: should try to take the set of actions that are
[6:05] Speaker 3: likely to prolong civilization, to minimize the probability of a
[6:09] Speaker 3: dark age, and reduce the length of a dark age.
[6:12] Speaker 3: If there is one anxiety about the imminent end of civilization.
[6:24] Speaker 3: Existential catastrophism is an essential feature of Muskism. Humanity, in
[6:30] Speaker 3: this understanding of the world, is always at risk of extinction.
[6:35] Speaker 3: Entrepreneurs and engineers are trying to save us all. I
[6:39] Speaker 3: got to wondering where this idea came from. When did
[6:41] Speaker 3: people begin worrying about human extinction?
[6:45] Speaker 9: That's a good question, So it depends on what you
[6:48] Speaker 9: mean by worrying.
[6:50] Speaker 3: That's Thomas moynihan, author of the twenty twenty book X Risk,
[6:54] Speaker 3: How Humanity Discovered its own extinction. I called it Moynihan
[6:58] Speaker 3: to ask him about the history of the panic. Don't
[7:00] Speaker 3: panic about human extinction, which is different from a religious
[7:04] Speaker 3: worry about the coming apocalypse.
[7:06] Speaker 9: The apocalypse occures a senseiment ending, whereas extinct anticipates the
[7:10] Speaker 9: ending of sense.
[7:11] Speaker 3: According to Moynan, people started worrying about human extinction sometime
[7:15] Speaker 3: in the eighteenth century during the Enlightenment, partly because scientists
[7:20] Speaker 3: studying fossils had begun to observe and to document the
[7:24] Speaker 3: extinction of other species, like dinosaurs. This fascinated romantic poets.
[7:30] Speaker 9: Byron himself refers to using steam engines to deflect incoming
[7:35] Speaker 9: asteroids and stop them from wiping out humanity.
[7:38] Speaker 3: Mary Shelley, a decade after she wrote Frankenstein, wrote The
[7:42] Speaker 3: Last Man, the first novel in English that imagines human
[7:46] Speaker 3: extinction by way of a global pandemic. By the end
[7:51] Speaker 3: of the nineteenth century, you get science fiction that imagines
[7:54] Speaker 3: a risk coming from other planets.
[7:57] Speaker 9: Nothing out of the shadow, like a gray snake.
[7:59] Speaker 3: Martians came to Earth in H. G. Wells's eighteen ninety
[8:02] Speaker 3: eight novel War of the World, But as morning Hand
[8:05] Speaker 3: points out, Wells also thought of other planets as a
[8:09] Speaker 3: way to avoid human extinction.
[8:11] Speaker 10: Thankies a gentleman, saind describers, I can highly force myself
[8:13] Speaker 10: to keep working at it.
[8:14] Speaker 9: At the end of War of the World's he mentions
[8:18] Speaker 9: that humanity might be able to migrate to Venus in
[8:22] Speaker 9: the long term, and that would somehow prolong the lifespan
[8:26] Speaker 9: of civilization.
[8:28] Speaker 3: But of course, early science fiction emerged during an era
[8:31] Speaker 3: of imperialism. After all, as Cecil Rhodes himself said, I
[8:36] Speaker 3: would annex the planets if I could.
[8:43] Speaker 10: HG.
[8:44] Speaker 3: Wells wasn't actually promoting a colony on Venus. He was
[8:47] Speaker 3: opposing British colonies on Earth. He began War of the
[8:51] Speaker 3: Worlds by talking about British colonial expansion into Tasmania, writing
[8:55] Speaker 3: that the Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were
[8:59] Speaker 3: entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination
[9:02] Speaker 3: waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years.
[9:05] Speaker 3: Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if
[9:08] Speaker 3: the Martians ward in the same spirit, The line from
[9:13] Speaker 3: Welles to Musk is a line of rupture to recycle
[9:16] Speaker 3: age of imperialism. Science fiction absent the criticism of imperialism
[9:21] Speaker 3: is to erase history. Moynan argues that in the middle
[9:27] Speaker 3: decades of the twentieth century, fears of human extinction got
[9:31] Speaker 3: ratcheted up after Harshima and during the Cold War, with
[9:35] Speaker 3: its concern about nuclear armageddon. The danger was an alien invasion,
[9:41] Speaker 3: the danger was us. By the nineteen eighties, people concerned
[9:45] Speaker 3: about what's come to be called existential risk, especially people
[9:49] Speaker 3: fighting for arms control, came up with some fancy calculations
[9:53] Speaker 3: to try to win the argument.
[9:55] Speaker 9: We shouldn't be thinking about human extinction as just the
[9:58] Speaker 9: death of the seven billion people that are currently alive.
[10:01] Speaker 9: We need to think about it more as the foreclosure
[10:05] Speaker 9: of all the future generations of people that could have been,
[10:08] Speaker 9: who could have had work while lives.
[10:10] Speaker 3: This idea really took off. This to me strange calculation
[10:16] Speaker 3: by which our lives, the lives of everyone here on Earth,
[10:19] Speaker 3: just don't amount too much compared to the lives of
[10:21] Speaker 3: all the future beings who won't live if we don't
[10:24] Speaker 3: establish colonies on other planets. Then, in the nineteen nineties,
[10:29] Speaker 3: moynihan says, a lot of tech people involved in early
[10:32] Speaker 3: message boards came together to really panic about a long
[10:36] Speaker 3: list of existential risks.
[10:38] Speaker 9: Asteroid or comet impact, super volcanic eruptions, stellar explosions, nuclear war,
[10:45] Speaker 9: climate degradation, and then one that also gets a lot
[10:47] Speaker 9: of attention as well is artificial intelligence.
[10:50] Speaker 3: At the time this list was growing on tech message boards,
[10:53] Speaker 3: Elon Musk was in college and then in Silicon Valley
[10:56] Speaker 3: developing his sense of mission. A few years back, Bernie
[11:03] Speaker 3: Sanders tweeted, We're in a moment in history where two guys,
[11:06] Speaker 3: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, own more wealth than the
[11:09] Speaker 3: bottom forty percent of people in this country. Musk tweeted back,
[11:14] Speaker 3: I am accumulating resources to help make life interplanetary and
[11:18] Speaker 3: extend the light of consciousness to the stars. Not everyone
[11:22] Speaker 3: thinks Musk and Bezos are heroically saving humanity from extinction.
[11:26] Speaker 3: My question is why do they think.
[11:29] Speaker 5: They're doing that.
[11:31] Speaker 3: Jeff Bezos was born in New Mexico in nineteen sixty four.
[11:35] Speaker 3: Both he and Elon Musk grew up on stories about
[11:39] Speaker 3: the Apollo eleven moon landing. The US ended its moon
[11:43] Speaker 3: program in nineteen seventy two, Bezos, a Star Trek fan,
[11:47] Speaker 3: always wanted to go back to the moon. Musk tells
[11:50] Speaker 3: a story about how, as a kid he went to
[11:53] Speaker 3: the NASA website to look up the schedule for going
[11:56] Speaker 3: to Mars, and was disappointed to find there wasn't one.
[12:01] Speaker 3: In nineteen sixty four, NASA had launched the Mariner for Probe,
[12:05] Speaker 3: the first spacecraft to fly by Mars.
[12:09] Speaker 7: Question is what will matter?
[12:10] Speaker 11: No reveal?
[12:11] Speaker 6: Of course, the possibility of life on Mars has been
[12:14] Speaker 6: debated for many years.
[12:16] Speaker 11: Faint lines seen on the surface have led to the
[12:20] Speaker 11: idea that these were.
[12:21] Speaker 6: Canals dug by the Martians.
[12:23] Speaker 11: But I don't think anybody goes that far these days.
[12:25] Speaker 3: The Probe sent back twenty one photographs unveiled at the
[12:28] Speaker 3: White House before Lyndon Johnson, but the photographs revealed a barren,
[12:33] Speaker 3: dusty wasteland, all but crushing any hope. As Johnson said
[12:37] Speaker 3: that there was life on Mars.
[12:40] Speaker 10: It may be. It may just be that life as
[12:45] Speaker 10: we know it, with its humanity, is more unique than
[12:54] Speaker 10: many have thought.
[12:56] Speaker 3: That view of Mars started to change in the nineteen nineties,
[13:00] Speaker 3: which marked a convergence. Tech types had become consumed with
[13:04] Speaker 3: the possibility of human extinction. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk,
[13:09] Speaker 3: We're starting to make millions, even billions of dollars, and
[13:12] Speaker 3: writers and scientists had begun to imagine ways Mars could
[13:15] Speaker 3: be made habitable. The science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson
[13:19] Speaker 3: published the Mars Trilogy, in which scientists from Earth have
[13:23] Speaker 3: terraformed Mars. In nineteen ninety eight, an aerospace engineer named
[13:28] Speaker 3: Robert Zubrin published a book called The Case for Mars.
[13:31] Speaker 12: There's three reasons why Mars should be the goal of
[13:37] Speaker 12: our space program, and in short, it's because Mars is
[13:40] Speaker 12: where the sciences, it's where the challenges, and it's where
[13:42] Speaker 12: the future is.
[13:43] Speaker 3: Bezos founded his space company Blue Origin in the year
[13:47] Speaker 3: two thousand. Musk started SpaceX two years later. In the
[13:51] Speaker 3: two and a half decades since, despite painful setbacks, SpaceX
[13:56] Speaker 3: has been an engineering wonder, a juggernaut revitalizing space exploration.
[14:02] Speaker 3: But even as the richest men on this planet were
[14:04] Speaker 3: thinking about traveling to other planets, more and more Earthlings
[14:08] Speaker 3: were worried about life here on Earth.
[14:11] Speaker 9: Five million students around the world took to the streets
[14:14] Speaker 9: and a climate strike last Friday, students flood of the
[14:17] Speaker 9: streets with a clear message, there is no planet B.
[14:22] Speaker 3: Well, Musk and Bezos were building rockets. There is no
[14:25] Speaker 3: planet B became the motto of the environmental movement, a
[14:29] Speaker 3: way for people to say that space exploration not only
[14:33] Speaker 3: fails to address the risk of human extinction, but is
[14:37] Speaker 3: instead part of the problem. Even Kim Stanley Robinson took
[14:41] Speaker 3: this line.
[14:42] Speaker 4: I still speak positively about us going to Mars and
[14:44] Speaker 4: even perhaps some day terraforming Mars, but it's a project
[14:48] Speaker 4: for like the year three thousand a d. What I
[14:52] Speaker 4: feel I have to say now is to remind people
[14:55] Speaker 4: there is no planet b It's not simple, it's not fast,
[14:58] Speaker 4: it isn't going to happen anytime soon, and so we
[15:01] Speaker 4: can't be thinking that Earth is disposable.
[15:03] Speaker 3: About twenty years ago Elon must began to change the
[15:06] Speaker 3: way he talked about going to Mars.
[15:09] Speaker 13: Have we screwed it up so badly here on this
[15:12] Speaker 13: planet that our only hope is to build a new
[15:15] Speaker 13: civilization out there?
[15:17] Speaker 4: No, not at all.
[15:18] Speaker 7: I actually I'm quite optimistic about the future of humanity
[15:20] Speaker 7: on Earth.
[15:20] Speaker 1: So what is the benefit to humanity then to inhabit Mars.
[15:24] Speaker 7: Well, I think if you consider two paths, one where
[15:26] Speaker 7: we're forever confined to Earth, and the other where we
[15:28] Speaker 7: are space frank civilization out exploring the stars. I think
[15:31] Speaker 7: the latter is far more exciting.
[15:33] Speaker 3: SpaceX is about taking science fiction stories and turning them
[15:36] Speaker 3: into fact. But what if SpaceX is actually fulfilling the
[15:39] Speaker 3: vision of dystopian science fiction by way of Muskism, not
[15:43] Speaker 3: only as extraterrestrial capitalism, but as a new political order.
[15:54] Speaker 3: Isaac Asimov's Foundation series first appeared as a book in
[15:58] Speaker 3: nineteen fifty one, but a more prophetic science fiction story
[16:02] Speaker 3: about money and politics and the future of humanity came
[16:05] Speaker 3: out in nineteen fifty two.
[16:07] Speaker 11: The Space Merchants, Frederick Poles and C. M. Cornbliss's modern
[16:12] Speaker 11: classic about the future when the wizards of high pressure
[16:15] Speaker 11: salesmanship take over.
[16:19] Speaker 3: The Space Merchants is dystopian science fiction, later made into
[16:23] Speaker 3: a radio drama. The story opens on a blighted, depleted,
[16:27] Speaker 3: overcrowded Earth had a board meeting of an advertising agency
[16:31] Speaker 3: called Fouler shockun.
[16:33] Speaker 11: Associates, gentlemen, Good morning, Good morning, that's the shogun. Now
[16:38] Speaker 11: sit down, sit down. I'm going to stand for a moment.
[16:41] Speaker 11: I have just come back on the Moon rocket, as
[16:43] Speaker 11: you know. Want to stretch my legs. How alright, there's
[16:47] Speaker 11: a shockun gentlemen. I am proud and I'm humble when
[16:52] Speaker 11: I say it's successful. The mining ventures are bringing the
[16:54] Speaker 11: people here on Earth many of the metals our forefathers
[16:57] Speaker 11: exhausted long ago. The colonist seemed quite untouched by the
[17:00] Speaker 11: Kanci revolutionists. Only six instances of Kanci' sabitaged in the
[17:04] Speaker 11: past week.
[17:06] Speaker 3: On this desperate, dying earth, po Shakun is worried about
[17:10] Speaker 3: Conci's conservationists, or what we'd call environmentalists gentlemen.
[17:15] Speaker 11: On my trip back from the Moon, I begin to
[17:18] Speaker 11: wonder are we getting soft? But now I've decided Fowler
[17:23] Speaker 11: Shotgun Associates is not soft, that it's ready to meet
[17:26] Speaker 11: a challenge greater than our development of the Moon, the
[17:29] Speaker 11: greatest challenge the world of advertising and promotion has ever met.
[17:33] Speaker 11: The colonizing of Beatus.
[17:37] Speaker 3: The Space Merchants wasn't the first version of this dystopian vision.
[17:41] Speaker 3: In his story from nineteen oh one with the excellent
[17:43] Speaker 3: title to Mars with Tesla, that is, with Nikola Tesla,
[17:48] Speaker 3: a guy advertising a rocket trip to Mars turns out
[17:50] Speaker 3: to be a con man. In twenty twenty two, in
[17:54] Speaker 3: Fowler Shokun Fashion, SpaceX was involved in the first fully
[17:58] Speaker 3: private entirely for profit mission to the International Space Station.
[18:03] Speaker 3: It carried three space tourists, paying fifty five million dollars
[18:07] Speaker 3: each for a seventeen days trip. The Washington Post has
[18:11] Speaker 3: reported that SpaceX might be involved in a project to
[18:13] Speaker 3: build the first hotel in space. Next up, the Red
[18:17] Speaker 3: Planet blussed back to the past to the US presidential
[18:25] Speaker 3: election year of twenty twelve. During that year's contest for
[18:28] Speaker 3: the Republican nomination, moderates like Mitt Romney said a plan
[18:33] Speaker 3: to go to the Moon was crazy.
[18:35] Speaker 1: I spent twenty five years in business. If I had
[18:38] Speaker 1: a business executive come to me and say they want
[18:40] Speaker 1: to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a
[18:42] Speaker 1: colony on the Moon, I'd say, you're fired. The idea
[18:46] Speaker 1: that corporate America wants to go off to the Moon
[18:49] Speaker 1: and build a colony there. It may be a big idea,
[18:51] Speaker 1: but it's not a good idea.
[18:52] Speaker 3: But far right Republicans like Newt Gingrich endorse this idea.
[18:57] Speaker 13: I'll tell you, I do not want to be the
[18:59] Speaker 13: country that, having gotten to the moon, first turned around
[19:02] Speaker 13: and said it doesn't really matter.
[19:04] Speaker 11: Let the Chinese dominate space. What do we care.
[19:07] Speaker 3: During the US presidential electtionction year of twenty sixteen, Gingrich
[19:12] Speaker 3: was one of Trump's closest advisors. Then, in the weeks
[19:15] Speaker 3: between Trump's election and his inauguration, Elon Musk and Jeff
[19:19] Speaker 3: Bezos both went to see him in Trump Tower. In
[19:22] Speaker 3: twenty seventeen, after Trump took office, people started talking about
[19:26] Speaker 3: moon fever. As one commentator put it, Trump wanted to
[19:30] Speaker 3: make the Moon American again. Americans, though, weren't much behind
[19:34] Speaker 3: this project. A poll found that sixty three percent of
[19:38] Speaker 3: Americans wanted NASA to focus instead on climate research. Only
[19:42] Speaker 3: thirteen percent favored another trip to the Moon. But this
[19:46] Speaker 3: didn't stop Trump.
[19:47] Speaker 13: Thank you very much, Vice President Pence for helping. Where's
[19:51] Speaker 13: our vice president?
[19:53] Speaker 10: Great job?
[19:54] Speaker 13: To restore American leadership in space.
[19:57] Speaker 3: Trump directed NASA to alter its schedule and make a
[20:00] Speaker 3: priority of sending Americans to the Moon.
[20:03] Speaker 13: Our journey into space will not only make us stronger
[20:05] Speaker 13: and more prosperous, but will unite us behind rand ambitions
[20:10] Speaker 13: and bring us all closer together.
[20:13] Speaker 4: Wouldn't that be nice?
[20:14] Speaker 13: Can you believe that space is going to do that?
[20:17] Speaker 3: At the end of twenty seventeen, at the White House,
[20:20] Speaker 3: Trump made a formal announcement of a new destination.
[20:23] Speaker 13: This time, we will not only plant our flag and
[20:27] Speaker 13: leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an
[20:30] Speaker 13: eventual mission to Mars and perhaps someday to many worlds beyond.
[20:37] Speaker 3: It wasn't only about science, he said.
[20:39] Speaker 13: Space has so much to do with so many other applications,
[20:42] Speaker 13: including a military application.
[20:45] Speaker 3: What he meant by that became clear. A year and
[20:47] Speaker 3: a half later.
[20:48] Speaker 13: We're gathered here in the Rose Garden to establish the
[20:51] Speaker 13: United States Space Command.
[20:54] Speaker 10: It's a big deal.
[20:56] Speaker 13: Spacecom will soon be followed very importantly by the establishment
[21:01] Speaker 13: of the United States Space Force as the sixth branch
[21:07] Speaker 13: of the United States Armed Forces.
[21:12] Speaker 3: Space isn't so much the next frontier as the next battleground,
[21:17] Speaker 3: and Elon Musk and his dream of a multiplanetary civilization
[21:22] Speaker 3: that is being funded by American taxpayers. SpaceX and Space
[21:26] Speaker 3: Force are two sides of the same bitcoin. SpaceX's military
[21:32] Speaker 3: projects have included manufacturing missile tracking satellites and new rockets
[21:36] Speaker 3: for Space Force, and developing a rocket capable of delivering
[21:40] Speaker 3: weapons anywhere in the world. By twenty twenty four, SpaceX
[21:45] Speaker 3: had received nearly twenty billion dollars in government contracts. Trump
[21:50] Speaker 3: vowed to increase that funding. We approached SpaceX for a response,
[21:55] Speaker 3: but at the time of recording we hadn't received a reply.
[22:01] Speaker 3: There is a politics of space lately, it looks less
[22:05] Speaker 3: like the politics of star Trek, a JFK style new
[22:09] Speaker 3: tier of exciting science and good government, then like the
[22:12] Speaker 3: politics of star wars, of swaggering generals and imperial death stars.
[22:18] Speaker 3: There's also something of a party politics of space, and
[22:22] Speaker 3: in the US it's been generally Republican and conservative. This
[22:26] Speaker 3: was true long before Musk became a Trump supporter and
[22:29] Speaker 3: the GOP's most generous donor in the Senate. The race
[22:33] Speaker 3: to space was, for a long time most fiercely endorsed
[22:35] Speaker 3: by the Texas Senator and one time presidential aspirant Ted Cruz.
[22:41] Speaker 14: No longer is space just an uninhabited void or a
[22:44] Speaker 14: scientific novelty.
[22:46] Speaker 3: That's Cruz in twenty nineteen, sharing a hearing on the
[22:49] Speaker 3: emerging space environment. Cruz grew up reading the science fiction
[22:53] Speaker 3: of Robert Heinlein, a noted libertarian and author of The
[22:57] Speaker 3: Man Who Sold the Moon. Heindline's estate awards the Heinland
[23:01] Speaker 3: Prize for Space commercialization. Both Musk and Bezos have won it.
[23:06] Speaker 14: By some estimates, the space sector grow to nearly three
[23:10] Speaker 14: trillion dollars in value in the next three decades alone.
[23:16] Speaker 14: It is also my belief that the world's first trillionaire
[23:20] Speaker 14: will be made in space.
[23:22] Speaker 3: One purpose of Space Force is to protect the space merchants.
[23:26] Speaker 3: Bernie Sanders wasn't the only person on the left to
[23:29] Speaker 3: notice the ironies here this daggering inequalities. In twenty nineteen,
[23:35] Speaker 3: Trevor Noah, the mixed race South African who hosts the
[23:37] Speaker 3: Daily Show on Comedy Central in the US, pictured Elon
[23:41] Speaker 3: Musk bringing colonists to Mars.
[23:43] Speaker 8: You gotta admit it would have been kind of funny
[23:45] Speaker 8: if Elon Musk waited until they landed on Mars to
[23:48] Speaker 8: be like, oh, I forgot to mention you are my
[23:50] Speaker 8: space slaves.
[23:51] Speaker 11: Now get to work building my base, because then uralize
[23:55] Speaker 11: all those rich white people would be slaving away on
[23:58] Speaker 11: the Martian fields.
[23:59] Speaker 4: They'll be singing their old Caucasians virtuals.
[24:02] Speaker 3: Trevor Noah tied race to space, but they got tied
[24:06] Speaker 3: together again in twenty twenty, After George Floyd was killed
[24:09] Speaker 3: in Minneapolis on May twenty fifth, a Monday, protests began
[24:14] Speaker 3: in Minneapolis that night. By Wednesday, they'd begun to spread
[24:17] Speaker 3: across the country. On Thursday, the governor of Minnesota called
[24:21] Speaker 3: in the National Guard. On Friday, Trump delivered an ultimatum,
[24:27] Speaker 3: tweeting when the looting starts, the shooting starts. That night,
[24:31] Speaker 3: as protesters gathered near the White House, the Secret Service
[24:34] Speaker 3: rushed the President to an underground bunker. The next day,
[24:39] Speaker 3: May thirtieth, twenty twenty, Trump boarded Air Force one. But
[24:43] Speaker 3: where to?
[24:44] Speaker 15: And now it's my high honor and distinct privilege to
[24:47] Speaker 15: introduce to you the man whose vision and relentless leadership
[24:52] Speaker 15: brought us to this historic day, the forty fifth President
[24:57] Speaker 15: of the United States of America, President Donald Trump.
[25:02] Speaker 3: Trump hadn't flown to Minneapolis to talk to protesters. He'd
[25:05] Speaker 3: flown to Florida to the Kennedy Space Center to watch
[25:08] Speaker 3: the long scale juel launch of SpaceX's first manned mission,
[25:11] Speaker 3: the first time a commercial space corporation carried people into space.
[25:16] Speaker 1: Ignition liptot at the Balcon nine.
[25:19] Speaker 11: And got.
[25:24] Speaker 15: It.
[25:25] Speaker 3: Was a weird freak of timing this history making moment.
[25:28] Speaker 3: Nearly four years ago, the George Floyd protests and SpaceX's
[25:33] Speaker 3: triumphant launch Big day.
[25:35] Speaker 6: Is a big day.
[25:36] Speaker 3: It wasn't unfortunate freak of timing. Trump took to the
[25:40] Speaker 3: stage to his trademark walk on music at the Space
[25:43] Speaker 3: Center and started out talking about the protests.
[25:46] Speaker 13: My administration will always stand against violence, mayhem, and disorder.
[25:52] Speaker 3: And it was a hard turn to get to the rocket,
[25:54] Speaker 3: but Trump tied the two together. He said, raceso's division,
[25:59] Speaker 3: Space brings unity.
[26:01] Speaker 13: Moments ago, as we witnessed the launch of two great
[26:05] Speaker 13: American astronauts into space, we were filled with the sense
[26:09] Speaker 13: of pride and unity that brings us together as Americans.
[26:16] Speaker 3: For Trump, SpaceX meant America first. Then he introduced an
[26:21] Speaker 3: American entrepreneur.
[26:22] Speaker 13: He's a little different than a lot of other people.
[26:25] Speaker 4: He liked rockets.
[26:27] Speaker 13: Elon Musk, Congratulations. Congratulations.
[26:31] Speaker 3: That's Trump basking in Musk's space glow. Since then, SpaceX
[26:37] Speaker 3: has created the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever built.
[26:42] Speaker 3: It's become the world leader in space exploration, and Trump,
[26:47] Speaker 3: after his defeat in twenty twenty and his failed attempt
[26:50] Speaker 3: to overturn the election, has come back to power to
[26:54] Speaker 3: winning re election decisively, this time with Musk at his side,
[26:59] Speaker 3: his own rocketman. SpaceX's engineering accomplishments are incredible, but what
[27:06] Speaker 3: about the costs? What about the risks? Not the existential ones,
[27:11] Speaker 3: but the ordinary ones. Watching the SpaceX launch that day
[27:18] Speaker 3: almost five years ago, now, all I could think about
[27:21] Speaker 3: was a poem by Gil scott Heron from nineteen seventy
[27:25] Speaker 3: about the Apollo mission. It's called Whitey on the Moon.
[27:30] Speaker 11: One such poem concerned the fact that millions and millions of.
[27:33] Speaker 10: Dollars are continually sent into out of space while we
[27:36] Speaker 10: continue to face the same problems here on the ground.
[27:40] Speaker 3: Scott Heron was writing about everyone left behind, the poor,
[27:43] Speaker 3: the needy, and their suffering. His sister bit by a rat,
[27:48] Speaker 3: getting sicker and sicker, and him with no money to
[27:50] Speaker 3: pay the doctor's bill while Whitey's on the Moon. I
[27:55] Speaker 3: listened to that poem that day, while Trump and Musk
[27:58] Speaker 3: watched that launch. It's still ringing in my ears all
[28:01] Speaker 3: these years later. As Trump and Musk dismantle USAID, ending
[28:06] Speaker 3: American aid programs around the world while ratcheting up the
[28:11] Speaker 3: Mars program. People have been trying to escape to Planet
[28:15] Speaker 3: B for a long time. That doesn't make it the
[28:18] Speaker 3: right thing for Planet A. Next time on x Man
[28:27] Speaker 3: Muscism here on Earth and the story of how the
[28:30] Speaker 3: man who sold the Moon became Iron Man.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.