Papa Mike McRoberts

space the final frontier um because i've been really passionate i love space and i guess it's because as a kid i grew up around the apollo missions absolutely and so you know um human beings going to going to the moon was a huge thing you'd watch those rocket launches there are just for context there were 17 apollo missions right so the first one was terrible um it never it never took off there was an explosion in the cabin three astronauts

were killed, and that set back the Apollo program for quite some time.

I think it was Apollo 8 that finally had a manned mission go around the moon, and so that was the first time that it happened.

They then went on through the big famous one, of course, is Apollo 11.

We had Buzz Aldrin and...

Neil Armstrong.

The unforgettable Neil Armstrong.

I'm going to come to that.

I'm going to come to that because that was incredible.

Apollo 13 was the one where they had an explosion so they couldn't land and then they managed to get their way back and it's still talked about as one of the great crisis management feats in modern human life, the way that NASA was able to do that.

And Apollo 17 was the last time.

we had a manned flight go around the moon or orbit the moon and people on the moon.

So that was back in 1972.

So it's been more than 50 years, almost as long as that was drought against the storm.

All that technology though, Papa Mike, we should be going every week, shouldn't we?

Well, this is a good point.

It's really expensive.

And so the other thing with that is that at the time there was the Cold War.

So there was this absolute space race on for the US to beat Russia.

It was seen as a strategic advantage for all sorts of reasons.