Artemis: Why Are We Really Going Back to the Moon?

The moon race is back! NASA’s Artemis II mission just sent four astronauts around the moon. And other countries — and billionaires — are lining up to take a crack at returning to the moon too. But why are we really going? Some say this is a lunar gold rush, that countries want to mine the moon for resources. Others are saying the real reason to go to the moon today is that it’ll help us get to Mars. To find out, we talk to engineer Dr. Angel Abbud-Madrid, physicist Prof. Nicolle Zellner, and astronomer Prof. Gregg Hallinan. [REBROADCAST] Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/ScienceVsGoingBackToMoon UPDATE 4/9/26: We updated this episode with information about more recent efforts to mine Helium-3 from the moon. This episode was produced by Meryl Horn and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, with help from Wendy Zukerman, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn, and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Tom Simko, Professor Jack Burns, Dr. Paul Byrne, Dr. Martin Elvis, Dr. John Mather, Dr. Jennifer Whitten, Dr. Ian Crawford, Dr. Simon J Lock, and Dr. Greg De Temmerman. Special thanks to Chris Suter, Jack Weinstein, the Zukerman family, the Fausther-Keeys family, and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. In this episode, we cover: (00:00) We’re going back to the moon! (06:23) Should we dig up rare earth elements on the moon? (10:05) Should we go back to the moon for Helium-3?(14:54) The moon as a training ground for Mars (19:55) The FARSIDE telescope: a portal into the universe’s history (27:12) So is it worth returning to the moon? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Versus.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Ten, nine, eight, seven.

• 0:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Today, we are pitting facts against frontiers.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Four, three, two, one.

• 0:13Wendy Zukerman?

  As we tackle the moon.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  And lift off. The crew of Artemis 2, now bound for the moon. Humanity's next great voyage begins.

• 0:25Wendy Zukerman?

  This week, four astronauts flew around the moon, going further into space than humans ever have before. The NASA mission is called Artemis 2, and they're scheduled to splash down back on Earth tomorrow. And all over the world, people have been stunned by this journey.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Oh my goodness! Oh! It's not just what you see and you hear as the rocket lifts off. You can actually feel the force of it through your body.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  It's absolutely amazing what's going on right now. And all I can say is, wow.

• 1:00Speaker 04

  She is the first woman to ever see the entirety of our planet.

• 1:04Wendy Zukerman?

  The world is following every moment of this mission, and that includes how the astronauts are getting by with a temperamental loo.

• 1:10Speaker 04

  Houston, we have a toilet burning.

• 1:12Speaker 05

  They're seeing shadows. And when you see shadows, you get to see terrain and relief. And you get to see the scale of the mountains. You can hear the excitement in their voice when they're talking about these craters. It's absolutely phenomenal.

• 1:24Wendy Zukerman?

  The astronauts themselves are in awe of everything they're seeing.

• 1:27Speaker 06

  Well, last night, we did have our first view of the moon far side. And it was just absolutely spectacular. You can see Copernicus, Reniorgama. It's just everything, and absolutely unbelievable. This is incredible. Coffee moon joy.

• 1:49Wendy Zukerman?

  And while these astronauts didn't land on the moon, in just two years, NASA hopes to get people to walk on the moon for the first time in over 50 years. And when that happens, when we actually see people walking on the moon again, that is sure to send our moon joy into warp drive. Angel Abbud Madrid, who studies space exploration now, remembers that moment back in 1969 and how amazing it was. He was eight years old, living in Chihuahua, Mexico, and his dad woke him up to see it.

• 2:26Speaker 05

  And I just remember very clearly my dad shaking me, "Come on, you gotta watch this."

• 2:31Wendy Zukerman?

  What do you remember from seeing on the screen?

• 2:36Speaker 05

  It was a small, black and white TV, and it was this grainy picture. And I start watching, and I see the human stepping out.

• 2:47Speaker 06

  It's one small step for man,

• 2:52Speaker 06

  one giant leap for mankind.

• 2:56Speaker 05

  My dad keeps saying, "This is a momentous occasion."

• 3:01Speaker 05

  Oh, we were talking about it the day after. Everybody was talking about it. And my uncle, my aunts were like, "Did you watch this? It was incredible." I mean, we made it to the moon, how far we have gone.

• 3:17Speaker 05

  And there in the corner was Grandma saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but don't we have enough problems here to be worrying about the moon? Why are we doing this?" And that really stuck with me.

• 3:28Wendy Zukerman?

  And not to be a moon killjoy here, but more than 50 years on, Grandma's still got a really good question here. Why are we doing this, really? After all, back in 1969, what felt like this big day for humankind was also this huge political pissing contest between the US and the Soviet Union. And around the time the US won, they slashed NASA's budget. And for decades, no one's been that serious about going back to the moon. That was until, well, just several years ago, really.

• 4:09Wendy Zukerman?

  Just as the US and China are getting particularly sassy with each other, here we go again. The race to the moon is back on with some new players as well.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  China's lunar rover touched down last night on the far side of the moon. India is set to head to the moon. Israel. South Korea. Japan.

• 4:28Speaker 05

  In the last, you know, five...

• 4:30Speaker 06

  Five years or so, this has really exploded in terms of interest. There are 73 space agencies and probably 20 more are being planned because every country's realising, maybe there's something in it for us.

• 4:44Wendy Zukerman?

  Like what?

• 4:46Wendy Zukerman?

  In a recent NASA report, they said that a big reason to go to the moon would be to keep the US in the leaders' position. Yeah, so they can keep on winning. And this week, President Trump posted, quote, "We are winning in space, on Earth and everywhere in between, economically, militarily, and now beyond the stars. Nobody comes close," end quote. So is this just about winning? Today on the show, we're returning to an episode that we ran a few years ago to ask, "Why are we really going back to the moon?" And when you listen to politicians and bigwigs in this space talk about why we are doing

• 5:29Wendy Zukerman?

  this, two big things come up a lot, and that's what we're going to rove through today. One is this idea of a lunar gold rush. Some say that there are trillions of dollars of resources up there in the moon waiting to be mined, and the first country to grab them will be one step closer to global domination. The second thing is going to Mars. People are arguing that going to the moon is crucial to getting to our ultimate destination, the red planet. But is that for real?

• 6:04Wendy Zukerman?

  When it comes to the moon, there's a lot of...

• 6:06Speaker 06

  Why are we doing this?

• 6:07Wendy Zukerman?

  But then, there's science.

• 6:13Wendy Zukerman?

  Science versus the moon is coming up just after the break.

• 6:24Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. On this podcast, we sort fact from fiction. So here's a quick truth for you. With Sapphire Reserve, you can spend all around the world. Not only that, but you can earn four times the points on flights and hotels, book direct, and three times the points on dining. Plus, enjoy access to award-winning airport lounges and exclusive restaurant tables. Learn more at chase.com/sapphirereserve. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Terms apply.

• 7:01Speaker 04

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• 7:36Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today, we're asking, why are we going back to the moon, really? Well, one reason is this idea of a lunar gold rush, that the moon is a treasure trove of valuable stuff just waiting for us to dig it all up. And the first country to get their hooks in wins.

• 7:58Wendy Zukerman?

  Now, we know that the moon does have untapped resources in it. When the Apollo astronauts brought back moon rocks, scientists discovered that, yes, they contained rare earth elements,

• 8:12Wendy Zukerman?

  which are super important to our lives today.

• 8:15Speaker 06

  They're part of our renewable energy industry. They are in your phones. The phone that you have in your hand right now has rare earth. They are in your cars. So it's part of our society right now.

• 8:26Wendy Zukerman?

  That's Angel Abbud Madrid again. He's now the director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines. Angel told us that one of these rare earth elements is called terbium. If you haven't heard of it, it's a shiny, soft metal. And it's used to make the color green on your phone. And there's a bunch of elements like this.

• 8:46Speaker 06

  Some of them really hard to pronounce. Lanthanum and yttrium and...

• 8:51Wendy Zukerman?

  Like neodymium and dysprosium. Rare earths are also used in stuff like solar panels and electric cars. The problem is that on Earth, mining these elements is pretty nasty. It can pollute soil and waterways. Plus, the vast majority of rare earths that we use come from China. And so the idea is that if the US or other countries could get their mitts on the stuff on the moon and then mine it without polluting the Earth, that would be win-win. So people thought.

• 9:27Speaker 06

  Well, these are important elements and we found them on the moon. Would it be worth going after them?

• 9:32Wendy Zukerman?

  And to you, is it worth going after them?

• 9:35Speaker 06

  Uh, not at this point, not from the information that we have.

• 9:41Wendy Zukerman?

  So even though these things are called rare Earth elements, there's actually a lot of them here on Earth. And not just in China. That's just currently where most of the mining is happening. All over the globe, we're finding these elements. Even though they're called rare Earth elements, they're actually not that rare.

• 10:00Speaker 06

  They're not actually that rare, believe it or not.

• 10:04Wendy Zukerman?

  And curiously, there isn't even that much of this stuff on the moon. We know from satellite data that there's a bit of a hotspot of rare earths, which happens to be on the right eye of the man in the moon. But even there, the elements aren't just sitting there like a big nugget of gold. They're diluted, mixed up with the moon dirt and will be hard to mine.

• 10:28Speaker 06

  Let me give you an analogy. It's like, uh, if you want to get rare earth on Earth, it's like putting a bucket in Seattle or New Orleans and collecting rainwater from there. As compared as on the moon, you will be having a bucket on Death Valley.

• 10:46Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh.

• 10:47Speaker 06

  Probably one of the driest places on Earth. You're looking for droplets.

• 10:51Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow, this is really a bad idea.

• 10:56Speaker 06

  At this point, it is.

• 10:59Wendy Zukerman?

  So it's sounding like we should probably work out ways to mine rare earths safely here on Earth and even get better at recycling the stuff on our phones before we resort to all the hassle and expense of going to the moon for these elements. Now, there is another idea that's been making the rounds on the web and in science fiction. And it's that the real treasure on the moon is this thing called helium 3. One Apollo astronaut has called it, quote, "The best reason to return to the moon in the 21st century," end quote. Helium 3 is a version of helium that people say could be used as fuel for clean nuclear energy.

• 11:43Wendy Zukerman?

  That means no harmful radioactive waste, but we'd still get all this great power.

• 11:50Speaker 06

  So you don't need much to generate a lot of energy. If you were to have enough helium, about 220 pounds, so that's the weight of a tall person, so 220 pounds of helium, you bring it all together, you generate energy, it will be enough to light up a city like Dallas for a full year. That's the amount of energy that you have from just 220 pounds of helium.

• 12:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow. And that would have no waste, not like the nuclear reactors we have now?

• 12:26Speaker 06

  No radioactive waste. The beauty of helium 3 is that what is the waste is just helium, the same thing that you put on balloons.

• 12:36Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, every one of these nuclear reactors could just be like, hello, hello, we're making clean energy.

• 12:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, everybody working there will have that, that type of voice, yeah.

• 12:46Wendy Zukerman?

  So, this all sounds great. You might say, "It sounds really, really great." But here's the catch. While it's true that the moon has way more of this special helium than we have here on Earth, if today you went all the way to the moon and grabbed some helium 3, then brought it back, you couldn't use it to power a city right now. And that's because the kind of nuclear reactor that we would use for this stuff... It doesn't exist. Right now, the way that we make nuclear power is by ripping atoms apart and using the energy for power. It's called nuclear fission.

• 13:27Wendy Zukerman?

  But for helium 3, we need to do something called nuclear fusion.

• 13:32Speaker 06

  This is the opposite. Instead of splitting the atom, you bring two of those atoms together, you fuse them, and that way you generate energy.

• 13:40Wendy Zukerman?

  So to get this helium 3 working, we're gonna need to crack nuclear fusion, and we have not cracked that yet.

• 13:45Speaker 06

  That's exactly right. Scientists and engineers have been working on controlling fusion for years and decades. It's been really hard. It's really hard to get that initial reaction going, that fusing of the elements.

• 13:57Wendy Zukerman?

  I feel like because fusion sounds like fission, you're like, well, you just need to change the I for a U. This is easy. But it's actually like completely different technology.

• 14:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a whole, that's quite a change of a letter. It takes a lot of work.

• 14:10Wendy Zukerman?

  And sure, it's possible that some countries are interested in this because they want to stake their claim on helium 3, like just in case it's useful someday and we can crack nuclear fusion. But I asked Angel. So if someone said to you, you know, say someone big, big in the White House who has like a massive checkbook and was like, I want to go to the moon for this helium 3, what would you tell him?

• 14:40Speaker 06

  That we can use that money for something else at the moment.

• 14:44Wendy Zukerman?

  Right. So for now, stripping the moon for parts to use back on Earth, it's not making a lot of sense. And it is kind of feeling like going back to the moon is more for international bragging rights. But what about this idea that popping back up to the moon could help us get to Mars? That perhaps the moon could be some kind of launching pad that could catapult us into the rest of the solar system? And this idea seems to be what got President Trump on board with the moon several years ago. I said, hey, we've already done the moon. That's not so exciting. They said, no, sir, it's a launching pad for Mars. We'll be doing the moon, but we'll really be doing Mars.

• 15:28Wendy Zukerman?

  So do we really need to do the moon to do Mars? That answer after the break.

• 15:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Plus, we'll find out why going to the moon might help us reveal secrets about the universe, like why you, me, and everything we know

• 15:49Wendy Zukerman?

  exists at all.

• 15:59Speaker 04

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• 17:03Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. So it's looking like the so-called lunar gold rush is more like a lunar gold bust. So what's the point of going to the moon? Well, some people say that we've got to go back to the moon so that we can get to Mars. And to find out if that's true, we called up Nicole Zelnam. She's a professor of physics at Albion College in Michigan. And Nicole is very excited about getting us to the red planet.

• 17:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Well, humans have explored for all of humanity, and Mars is an

• 17:41Speaker 04

  As just the next step in in human exploration.

• 17:47Wendy Zukerman?

  Now, technically speaking, you don't have to go to the moon to go to Mars. We can fly direct. In fact, that's what Elon Musk is planning to do with SpaceX. But Nicole says that doesn't mean the moon is useless here. NASA released this big report about their plans for the moon, and it actually does have to do with Mars, but not to use it as a launchpad. Their idea is to use it as a training ground for Mars,

• 18:16Wendy Zukerman?

  which Nicole says makes a lot of sense.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  You're not going to climb Mount Everest on a whim, right? You're going to climb somewhere in the Catskills first, and then you're going to you're going to work your way up into higher and higher elevations. You're going to train for that Mount Everest trip. And you can think about Mars being the Mount Everest for now.

• 18:37Wendy Zukerman?

  This is because Mars is so much further away than the moon. It takes just a few days to get to the moon, but at least six months to get to Mars. If you forget your wrench there, there's no Amazon Prime. Producer Merrill Horn talked to Nicole about it.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  You're not just going to go there without any practice. That that's. It's like a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for disaster, yeah. I was going to say it's a fool's errand. I mean, it's it's you just don't go somewhere without practicing it first. I mean, that's common sense.

• 19:10Wendy Zukerman?

  Already on Artemis 2, they've learned a bunch of things. The toilet broke and they had to pee in bags at one point. But that got up and running. Mission specialist Christina Cook helped fix it.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  I'm the space plumber. I'm proud to call myself the space plumber.

• 19:26Wendy Zukerman?

  There've also been a bit chilly on board, and astronaut Victor Glover, the pilot on Artemis 2, said at one point that he'd hoped they'd pack different sleeping bags.

• 19:37Speaker 05

  It is quite cold. And, uh, yeah, we're wishing we had the, uh, the, uh, lower temperature sleeping bags with us.

• 19:44Wendy Zukerman?

  You don't want to be shivering all the way to Mars. And NASA's longer term plan on the moon is actually pretty fun when you look at the details. Like I mentioned, in two years, they're planning to put people on the moon. And then in the longer term, NASA is talking about building a lunar base and learning how to deal with the tough conditions that come with being on a whole new space rock. Like, one thing they're gonna have to deal with is moon dust. It's like tiny bits of corrosive glass that were a huge pain in the ass for the Apollo astronauts. Nicole told us some of the things they said about it.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  When I took my helmet off, I was almost blinded. Junk immediately got into my eyes. The dust really bothered my eyes and throat. I was tasting it and eating it. So, when you're in an environment where you can't even go outside without putting a space suit on, and then you come back inside, you've got dust everywhere, you gotta figure out how to, how to deal with that.

• 20:43Wendy Zukerman?

  And another thing that they'll be dealing with is drinking water. At first, our moon astronauts will get their water from a spacecraft orbiting the moon, kind of like the International Space Station. But it's hoped that these pioneers will ultimately find good water sources on the moon that they could drink and then start to fend for themselves. And eventually, the vision is that if we do find enough water on the moon, maybe we'd use it not just for drinking water, but for something else, as fuel, to power rocket ships that would venture out into the solar system. And this isn't totally bonkers.

• 21:27Wendy Zukerman?

  You know, water, even on the moon, is just hydrogen and oxygen. And the fuel that we usually use for rockets now is hydrogen.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  And we can split apart those water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, and then that hydrogen can be used as a rocket fuel.

• 21:46Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, do we have all the science for that yet?

• 21:49Speaker 04

  We do. Yep, we, we know how to do this.

• 21:52Wendy Zukerman?

  Plus, having a gas station on the moon would be an added bonus, because it would be easier for rockets to take off from around there, because they could sidestep Earth's strong gravity.

• 22:04Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, so it makes sense that you'd want to figure out the nuts and bolts of living on the moon before you live on Mars. But maybe you're not sold on any of this. Maybe going to Mars just feels like part of the same pissing contest. And it's starting to feel like what we really need is a giant toilet roll on the moon. Well, guess what? We found one. And turns out, it's one of the best reasons we've heard to go back to the moon. One of its biggest cheerleaders is Greg Hallinan, a professor of astronomy at Caltech. And he wants to put a telescope on the moon, on the far side, to be specific. That's the side that's always facing away from us.

• 22:49Wendy Zukerman?

  And Greg and his team are so amped about this that they actually named their telescope Far Side. But it's an acronym.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  Oh, it stands for...

• 22:59Wendy Zukerman?

  Are you looking it up? I know it up my arse.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  A hundred percent, I am guilty. I have not memorized the horribly forced acronym we have used to name the Array Far Side. It is called the Far Side Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark Ages and Exoplanets.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Wait, what is it again? It's the...

• 23:20Speaker 03

  Far Side Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark Ages and Exoplanets. And remember, the first word of the acronym is the acronym. So how bad an acronym is that?

• 23:32Wendy Zukerman?

  As bad as the acronym is, it's gonna look great. Greg sent me a picture.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Okay, here we go. Can you see that okay?

• 23:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, it looks real pretty.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  It does, it does.

• 23:45Wendy Zukerman?

  So what we're looking at, look, to tell you the truth, is it looks like a real space-age toilet roll, a little?

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Oh, it does. It's got that hole at the bottom. Yeah, that's right.

• 23:55Speaker 05

  Right?

• 23:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it does, it does. It's very fa- it's very fancy toilet roll. It's gold, it's gold plated. I don't think it'd feel very good, but it would be very expensive.

• 24:04Wendy Zukerman?

  The plan is that this roll will deploy a giant telescope that will cover an area that's 10 kilometres across. That's over six miles.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  In my opinion, if we're gonna go to the moon, this is why we should go.

• 24:17Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, so this awkwardly named Toilet Roll Telescope won't feel good for wiping your bum. But this telescope is gonna do something even better. It's gonna help us understand why your bum exists at all. To understand how, let's travel all the way back in time to a period before basically anything existed. It's called the Dark Ages. It's this huge gap in time right after the Big Bang. Scientists agree that some 14 billion years ago, the entire universe was inside this teeny tiny incredibly hot bubble,

• 25:01Wendy Zukerman?

  which went bang, it exploded, and the universe was born. From here, hot plasma was thrown up everywhere.

• 25:16Wendy Zukerman?

  And when that settles, all we have left are these dark clouds everywhere.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  At that point, the entire universe was a sea of hydrogen and some helium and basically nothing else. Just a sea of neutral stuff.

• 25:31Wendy Zukerman?

  And then, something changes.

• 25:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Out of this sea of stuff, stars formed and then galaxies and then yada, yada, yada, dinosaurs, Big Macs, podcasts, everything we know. And the big mystery is, what changed in this weird dark soup that caused stars and everything we know to be born? Because without that, we'd still be in darkness. And we don't know how it happened. And the reason that this is such a big mystery is that our traditional tools for peering back in time are telescopes that measure light. But they can't help us here, like even if we built a giant one.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  But if you could build a space telescope the size of the planet Earth, it wouldn't be good enough because there was no light, no light, no optical light that we could see with our eyes. Hence the term the Dark Ages. The only things that existed back in the Dark Ages was this soup of hydrogen, some helium, and a couple of other small, you know, elements.

• 26:37Wendy Zukerman?

  And since there was a bunch of hydrogen floating around in the Dark Ages, that is the key. We need to be able to measure hydrogen to know what happened. And Greg's telescope is designed to do just this. Because it turns out that that soup of hydrogen from billions of years ago, it made radio waves that we can still find today. Greg reckons if we could hear it, it would sound something like this.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  On one, two, three.

• 27:12Wendy Zukerman?

  That's it. A quiet hiss from the universe could be what we need to reveal the secrets of our cosmic dawn. By analyzing the radio waves, Greg reckons that we could get a sort of timeline of what happened.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  We can play a movie that tells us how the universe evolved from that moment all the way through to when we can actually see galaxies and stars.

• 27:38Wendy Zukerman?

  And Greg needs to put this telescope on the moon. It wouldn't work if we put it on Earth because we have this rather annoying atmosphere.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  The signal can't get through the atmosphere. You just can't, it's like looking through a brick wall, literally. You know, that's how, that's how, how much the signal is blocked by the atmosphere. So you just can't see it. And that's why we hop over the brick wall and go to the moon.

• 28:02Wendy Zukerman?

  Greg hopes that his super fancy telescope will also help us solve another big mystery of the universe. Are we alone? And that's because its souped up equipment can study planets outside of our solar system called exoplanets. In particular, it'll be looking for exoplanets that have magnetic fields, also called magnetospheres, which we think are important for life. Like, for example, Earth has a magnetosphere. Radio telescopes can pick it up. In fact, when Earth's magnetic field is converted into sound, this is what it sounds like.

• 28:47Wendy Zukerman?

  Meryl talked to Greg about his big plans.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Let's say, you know, this is all set up. You turn on the switch and you start getting this data. And then like you find an exoplanet with a magnetosphere. How big a moment would that be? That's my, my ultimate dream. We are designing and building the space telescopes that can actually detect signatures of life at other planets. You know, that would be such a profound moment, you know, discovering life outside our solar system.

• 29:22Wendy Zukerman?

  I, I just, I assumed that like the politicians all around the world, that this is just kind of a pissing contest about who can get to the moon faster and who could put the coolest thing on the moon. And then the scientists just get to kind of go, okay, honey. But while, while you're having a pissing contest, I'm going to do some cool [BLEEP] on the side.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  I mean, the Apollo, the Apollo missions very fundamentally was the mother of all pissing contests, right?

• 29:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  And that being said, it's possible for national prestige projects to be fundamentally good in their application. I think the lunar landing is an example of that. The moon landing is, I think, really like achieves so much. It transformed our position and our view of ourselves in the cosmos. There, there were science done for the moon that was fundamental. So once again, even though it was in its origin, like you said, a pissing contest, in its eventuality, I think it was a fundamentally beneficial thing for all humanity. I think the same applies to what happens on the moon in the future.

• 30:29Wendy Zukerman?

  Greg and everyone we spoke to about this said that these literal moon shots always seem to pay us back in spades. The technology that we developed in the first moon race eventually led to things like smaller computers, GPS, even memory foam, which funnily enough, everyone always forgets about.

• 30:50Wendy Zukerman?

  So even though in some ways going back to the moon is still a political pissing contest, at least we get some cool science. And although this maybe isn't a science reason for going to the moon, seeing all of these stunning images of the craters on the moon and this big lonely blue marble that we call home that are coming back from this mission, it's making a lot of folks have these big feelings about Earth and how fragile and small we are, which is some feelings that you don't get from most pissing contests.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  There's so much beauty and so much life and so much potential. And what are we doing with it? For me, realizing that this is our address in the universe, that this is the place that we inhabit, it's freeing.

• 31:52Speaker 05

  I can really see Earth as one thing. Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we're doing is special, but we're the same distance from you. And I'm trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special. In all of this emptiness, this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.

• 32:21Wendy Zukerman?

  That's Science Vases.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Hi, this is Meryl again. Just a quick update. Since we originally ran this episode, there's been a newfound interest in helium three. And it's not just about nuclear fusion. This stuff is being used for things like quantum computing and medical equipment. And some companies have even gotten contracts from the US government to start harvesting helium three from the moon in the next several years. Okay, back to Wendy and the credits.

• 32:48Wendy Zukerman?

  What do you think? Are these good reasons to go back to the moon? Let us know. We're on Instagram, science underscore V S. I'm on TikTok at Wendy Zook. There's also a comments section if you're listening to this on Spotify, so you can tell us what you think. And if you like the show, one way that you can support us is not only by giving us a five star review, but also by writing something nice in the comments. On bad days, when you have a big snotty nose, like I do now, it just makes me feel a bit nice.

• 33:20Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode has 121 citations and if you want to read more about the Artemis missions, NASA's hopes for the moon, the science of anything we talked about on the show, there's a link to this transcript in the show notes.

• 33:39Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode was produced by Merrill Horn and Akedi Foster-Keeys with help from me, Wendy Zukerman, Rose Rimler and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell, fact checking by Diane Kelly, mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka, music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munga and Bobby Lord. A big thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr Tom Simcoe, Professor Jack Burns, Dr Paul Byrne, Dr Martin Elvis, Dr John Mather, Dr Jennifer Whitten, Dr Ian Crawford, Dr Simon J Locke and Dr Greg D Temmerman. A special thanks to Chris Suter, Jack Weinstein, the Zukerman family, the Foster-Keeys family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zukerman, back to you next time.