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