Bill Whittle

the point where all of this social pressure and expectation and hope and pride had reached its pinnacle when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface.

And after that was over,

people started saying okay well what's next it's an unfortunate reality that the twenty or thirty years of the space shuttle program ran the space shuttle didn't fundamentally go anywhere different than john blended on on of friendship seven you know nineteen sixty one or sixty two we just want in circles around the earth again and again we didn't lose the technology we lost the will and the determination

And seeing this mission finally clear the pad is a long overdue step in that direction.

Well, just to answer the second part of your statement first, we spend half of our budget every year on social programs.

It's not like we don't spend any money here on Earth.

We spend $2 trillion a year on Earth, on our citizens.

The space budget is a fraction, 1% I think, of the total federal budget.

So the question now is, what's different about today's world versus the 1960s?

And I'll be perfectly frank with you, Michael.

If it were up to NASA and Artemis, I would not have any faith that we are going back there because the first space race was a political objective.

It was a chance to beat the Soviets in the Cold War using Cold War weapon systems.

This is the thing that most people don't really realize, but the Apollo program was using ballistic missile technology, computer technology, radar tracking, all of these things.

And so once we proved that we were better than the godless commies, then the essential purpose of Apollo went away.

The hope for the future is with companies like SpaceX because SpaceX is doing it for profit.

And the genius of Elon Musk is not that he builds these incredible rockets or anything.

The actual genius of Elon Musk, in my opinion, is that Elon Musk has found a way to make his space program pay for itself

through the Starlink satellite system.

He's launching his own space internet.

His space internet is paying for his launches.