Kevin Nolan

My word.

Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?

So over four fifths of the planet are only witnessing people going to the moon for the first time.

And it's probably part of the reason actually why there's been so many conspiracy theories about that people have not gone to the moon.

Literally, people weren't alive to witness it.

Yeah, I can.

I mean, the answer is actually just basically that it's so difficult.

I mean, to get people to the moon in 1969 to 1972, it cost the USA about 4% of their GDP.

And actually, the way I like to say it is, when you break that down, each Saturn V launch was the same cost as Ireland's GDP at that time.

Right.

Now, that's how expensive it was.

Now, currently, NASA gets less than one tenth of that budget wise.

Now, not only not only is that the issue of expense, but actually they didn't want to go back in the meantime just to do that again.

So what they've been working on really, I suppose, since around 2004 actually is the idea of doing it sustainably so that you can go forever more sustainably.

People don't quite realise the origin of this did come from the actual Columbia shuttle disaster in 2004 when basically the second shuttle destroyed.

I remember Challenger in 1986.

Yes, 14 in total actually.

from both of them yeah so the thing is that for the fairness of George Bush Jr he actually called the bipartisan committee together they formed a thing called the Vision for Space Exploration and that was the origin of what was to become the space launch system for Artemis they just decided not safe enough we're not really going anywhere anyway in Earth orbit let's go back to doing as you say what we were originally intended to do and go deeper into space and it has just taken that long to do it now effectively each Artemis launch is somewhere between one sixth to one tenth the cost of the original launch

or Apollo.

Some people debate that figure, but it's a lot cheaper.