Nasa’s new administrator discusses the space race with China, UFOs, billionaire ‘astronauts’ and building a ‘mission control’ for climate change
When Apollo 11 launched in July 1969,was an army lieutenant on leave behind the iron curtain, listening with colleagues to the BBC on shortwave radio.
“Why the moon?” Nelson says. “Because the goal is Mars. What we can do on the moon is learn how to exist and survive in that hostile environment and only be three or four days away from Earth before we venture out and are months and months from Earth. That’s the whole purpose: we go back to the moon, we learn how to live there, we create habitats.”
Leaders of the American and Russian space agencies had a constructive relationship during the later part of the cold war; can Nelson establish a similar channel to his Chinese counterpart? “If I had my druthers I would, but you can’t have a relationship if the other party doesn’t want to have a relationship. It takes two to tango. They have indicated no interest in the two of us doing the tango.”All 12 people who walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972 were white American men.
Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 command module pilot, once described Earth as “blue, white, very shiny … such a beautiful tiny thing, nestled in this black velvet of the rest of the universe”. William Shatner, 90, famed for playing Captain Kirk in Star Trek, rode aboard a Blue Origin rocket in October to become the oldest person in space“the covering of blue, this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue that we have around us”.
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