Hey everyone, it's Audie. This is the assignment. And where were you when Artemis II touched down?

It may be one of those stories in the latest chapter of space. And the stories of space, you know, they evoke a lot of things. There's joy, there's inspiration, there's fear. Frankly, there's just like embrace in the face of this very scary news cycle. It's like a throwback to a simpler time somehow. Of course, once you dig into it, you realize those times weren't that simple. But my guest today is astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi. He knows everything there is to know about space. He used to work at NASA and he's going to help me parse through all of the complicated feelings we have in this new era of space exploration. Stay with us.

'So I watched the touchdown of Artemis 2, gathered the kids, brought them into the living room, had it on the big screen, and I'm not going to lie, I was scared. I was really scared because when I was seven, when I was my children's age, the Challenger disaster, okay, where there had been a teacher in space program, so all the little kiddies had been told to gather around. You know, live feed to the classrooms. But then when I was in college, there was the Columbia and that disaster was on re-entry, right? Am I remembering that right? That was in 2003.

'Yeah, I was in my early 20s for Challenger and in my 30s for Columbia. And subsequent to that, I had a career as a space researcher and I also am aware of, you know, like Astro-E experiment blowing up on the launch pad. So I am always thinking about the safety of the people that are on board these giant rockets. I am holding my breath at every takeoff and every re-entry. So in this mission for me on re-entry, if you look at the video, you'll see that one of the three parachutes opened up a bit later than the others. And I wasn't sure it was going to open fully. And that really had me on the edge of my seat. And then once it fully deployed, that's when I finally gave that sigh of relief, was filled with that sense of elation and couldn't stop smiling for, you know, two or three days.

That's when that's when my kids were jumping on the couch. There was a lot of like, you know, they were they were ecstatic. They were so happy and I was happy for them. And it was a reminder of it felt like a good moment to talk about why space travel, real space travel kind of draws this out of us and why this one in particular, the Artemis II like kind of captured something. First, I want to say that unlike the 1960s, back then getting to the moon, it was important and it was also politically important because it was this like other battleground, right? It wasn't just about space exploration. It was about beating other countries, of course the Russians to getting there. And then for a while, frankly, it seemed like it was between the U.S. Private sector versus the U S public sector. I have to assume just about everyone you know is working for private sector space.

'All of the above. I know both. And here's the thing to understand is that, you know, I was in the government public sector working at NASA headquarters and there is a law that the public sector is not allowed to compete with the private sector. So both the public sector and the private have a role. So the public does what only the public can do. The SLS, the space launch system, is a massive investment. A government-sized investment, and when you talk about exploring the outer solar system, it's the exact same thing. It requires the government. So the government is at the frontier and the edge, and so it's like the difference between basic science and engineering. The scientists discover the new ways that the universe works, and then the engineers take advantage of it through their technologies. And in the very same way, the federal government pushes the limit, pushes the edge and then they're followed by these commercial interests. So that helped.

So that helps me understand because then that's why like the SpaceX's and the Blue Origins and stuff like that, they're making satellites. They're offering launches and then there's space tourism, this world of like whatever suborbital. I don't know. We're getting into the stuff that I barely know. But what you're saying is there's a reason for that. Like the stuff we know how to do. We're letting the private sector pretty much do but the stuff you really want to do we still are paying for that as taxpayers.

Exactly. And what you see is happening with the Artemis mission now is we're creating a new space infrastructure that is going to create a new economy. They want to get this, uh, to the level of a launch every six months, right? Right now we're doing a launch, you know, every few years.

My lungs cannot handle that. Am I to be freaked out every six months? What are you saying?

Well, you know, if you you know things, technology start off really dangerous and over time they get better. They don't become accident free ever. And sometimes you have to, not sometimes, virtually all the time. You have to have a bit of tolerance. We still fly in airplanes. We still ride on cars. We still ride on trains. We still right on ships. And every year those have accidents. Space has this incredibly low tolerance for accidents, right? The number of space you can't know. When was the last death due to space flight, right? You know, you got to think hard about that. But understand that this is a pathway and the government is establishing an infrastructure that as much as the internet created new economies and the smartphone created new economy, this new space endeavor of our nation will create a new economy.

I want to touch on something you just said about the accidents are, are still rare, right? Like we're compared to other things, but I feel like when something goes wrong with a space mission, it's not just the deaths. It's the death of possibility. And there's something about space exploration that we all feel is, is like fundamentally at its core, a hope driven endeavor.

Love that, yes.

And I don't know if the billionaire thing has kind of changed that. Cause once you see like Katy Perry doing it, you're like, oh shit, you know, like what, what was this for? Um, that was for the highest bidder, right? That doesn't feel as exciting. Right. But can you talk about that, that like, I don't any other science, even as important as they all are that have that kind of layer of pressure on them that you see in like pop culture, in the movies and things like that.

'The thing about this space endeavor is that it's incredibly inspirational and aspirational and it's incredibly visible, right? So if there are people that are on the cutting edge of, say, boring tunnels or deep- sea exploration, you know, unless something goes catastrophic or it's a or it is an individual that is good at bringing attention to themselves like James Cameron, right, going down in a submersible down to the Titanic, you don't hear about it. But with space, it's different, right? It's very visible. And because of that, you know, there was a plan for the Hubble Space Telescope originally that it would be captured by a space shuttle, put into its cargo bay, brought back down to Earth and placed into the Smithsonian. But after the shuttle accidents, you can't risk human lives on doing something that's that dangerous. And I was at the meeting in Washington, D.C. many years ago when we were having these discussions on what to do. And a particular scientist brought up the fact that, you know, look, you know, this thing de-orbits on its own and kills one person. It is a major disaster for the space agency and for space because of that visibility. But that same person could have walked out of their house, gotten into their car, and they have a much higher orders of magnitude, higher probability of getting into a car accident, but we don't think of it the same way. So it is a matter of perception, visibility, framing.

It's like a different risk proposition on is it worth it, whatever that it is, right. Right. Um, cause so many things are brought to us from space exports and so many technologies. Um, but I was just thinking like, when you look at the movies, right, there's like a run of movies, I feel like in the nineties, maybe the odds, what is time where mainly people leave the planet to like shoot down asteroids. And then maybe people are in space fighting off aliens that they didn't realize they were bringing back home is basically rocket ship as haunted house. Like, there are all these ways that we you know what I mean? That's what I consider the alien film. Shout out to Ridley Scott, like they're basically a haunted house, but with female body horror.

Right, yeah.

And we project our fears as much as our hope.

'Yes, we do. We project our fears and our hopes into this realm. You know, and it's interesting because I remember sitting at my grandfather's knee and he watched a lot of Westerns. And I remember the popularity of Western's. And now, you know, the adventure is space. What a big difference. But what we've seen-

Which we also call the Wild West, right? Like whatever we want to talk about, unfettered ambition and grand ideas, we say it's the Wild west.

Right and you know there's that era of the age of exploration on the high seas right in the 19th and 18th centuries that we, that humans look at but these are the stories that we tell and the people that give their lives they become heroes, right? They're heroic figures and the people that undertake this, you know that they have to be incredibly courageous and I think that is why we find it so inspirational. Courageous people doing daring things in dangerous situations and the result is revealing new knowledge, breaking new ground and creating a future for future generations that those people themselves never get to see.

After the break, Hakeem tells me what he has learned from pondering the vastness of the universe.

What would you tell the version of you that had doubts, right? In the era when people, especially AI, I've been thinking like, oh, we're so excited to get these photos back when we're in the age of AI, are people gonna believe them? What would you you tell the version you that really has had doubts about science?

Well, what happened to that version of me is that I got to actually know people who do it, right? And I got actually gained some understanding about things that I didn't know that I didn't. And, you know, I grew up in a, you know, 1970s and 80s deep south and found myself at age 24 in the San Francisco Bay area, very different population of people. And a lot of those people, based on their group, I had opinions about them that weren't the most positive. And it had nothing to do with reality. It had to do with narratives, right, from the culture I was in. And so we all want to feel special. So, you know, when I got there, you know, I was at home and I was hearing, oh, you know, the rich people are like this. And then I go there and I'm at Stanford University an elite environment, I'm hearing, oh, the poor people are like this and they're both completely wrong. They're both the people completely wrong Because people are people and most people are good people in my experience, right? I've been around the nation around the world. I've known people, you know, I hang out with billionaires one day I'm in the hood and next and another time I'm into you know in the in the plains of Kenya hanging out with the Samburu tribesmen, right and People are people. And when you have these negative thoughts about groups you haven't known enough people. That's what that means.

I noticed that even the astronauts from the Artemis talked about humanity.

Ultimately we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.

It wasn't like just about the US or the US ingenuity or that kind of thing. And, and to me kind of making a real point in this moment when, you know, the US in particular is at war.

Yeah, and when you do this sort of work, when you see the planet as a whole, you see humans as a species. On a planet, you know, representing, you know, like in rap, they say, I'm going to rep my hood, right? Well, you know, for many of us, our hood is our planet and our species. And I remember politically there was someone who's called themselves a citizen of the world and they take a lot of flack, right from the nationalist elements in our nation. And I think that's a mistake. I do, you know, we know what the aspiration is because it shows up in our science fiction of the future where we're beyond scarcity. We're beyond discrimination, right? We're one. Human family working together. I hope we can achieve that someday. We're not there yet. But, you know, these astronauts are doing their part to push forward that perspective. And that hope, right? Because I think that it's a shame that we don't get out of us what we I'm I'm not going to call it wasted humanity, but we're not at a point where everyone gets to decide how they're going to live their life and they're well informed, right? A lot of us act out what we who the world tells us what we are and who we are.

One of the astronauts, she said that someone asked her kind of what struck her, you know, looking back and she said, and this is really fascinating. She said it was really the absence around us, the darkness around her and she was saying it really drove home the idea that we're all together in this boat, so to speak. And that there's at least for now, you know just the darkness. And I hadn't heard it put that way. I've heard it as, oh, we're all together, we are on Earth, but I hadn't heard someone say, yo, if you really look around, there is nothing there and we are in it together.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, chances are we're not going to find any others. And that's absolutely right. We are.

You're gonna get all the UFO people mad, but continue.

'Absolutely, I get them mad all the time. In fact, online, they're like, he's CIA. He's part of the cover-up. And I'm like, me? Like, bro, you need to sit down with me and have a chat if you think I'm CIA.

You're not holding out to find anyone else, so it's like really making good with what we've got.

The universe is a lonely place because it's so darn big. And that's the thing that people, you know, if you don't really take years to ingest and understand till you get to the point like, you know, I reached eventually where I could see the sky in 3D when you know the distances to the objects you're looking at, you know their sizes. So, you have an intuition built in in your mind that if I know how big something is, and I know by looking at how big it appears to be, how far away it really is, right? And then you see it at its real size. Like if you see a human being that's really far away, you I was younger, people just played this game. I'm gonna squish you, right? Because you're, you look so small. A person at a distance, I'm going to squish them. But, you know, in your mind, you see that person's true size. So if you know the distance to the moon and you know its true size and you look up at the night sky and see it, you're like, whoa, that thing is massive, right? That thing is huge. The same way with the planet. Seeing Jupiter in the night sky, knowing it's 10 times bigger than the Earth or the sun, knowing it is 100 times bigger and the distance of 93 million miles. Right. You get you get that sense of like, Whoa. And almost no one has that perspective. On this planet, right? You got to be some expert nerd who's been doing it for years to develop that in your mind. But once you do you realize that the universe is an incredibly lonely place And here we are hanging out in the blackness of space orbiting this star and even that statement hanging in the Blackness of Space. The amount of time I've spent just pondering that and what does that mean to be in the you know like for us something being buoyant in the atmosphere or floating on the ocean it gives you a perspective of a medium and something in it but space isn't the same, you know, it's. And it's strange, you know, and I tell you it I understand how people go mad.

'Why do you think this is resonating for the rest of us who don't know the things you know? Like, what is it that this moment, this launch, this re-entry, like culturally is grabbing our attention?

'Well, there are a lot of cultural trendsetters. If you go back in the day, right, Carl Sagan was a revelation, right? Oh, a science communicator. And within professional circles, you know, people at the time say he was punished for being that. Then you have this era where you have just a few, the Neil Tyson, Michio Kaku, maybe Brian Cox, right. But now you're in an era where every graduate student is a science-communicator, right! Every student of journalism is an independent journalist. So many people who appreciate this and are able to share their passion online has now provided food. There was a time in my early 20s where I felt like I had read everything there was to read about, you know, physics and space and, you, know, weird science. And when you're a consumer of this stuff, there's never enough content. And now all these people can feed that attention and feed that curiosity. So the passion is spread much further through the population. Might still be a small percentage of people that are playing close attention, but you know, it's like being a casual observer of the NFL or the NBA. Someone in your family watches it. So you know the names, right? And so it's the same thing going on, I think now, with space because among the sciences, it tends to be the most inspirational and attention getting.

We're in this moment where you have this private sector guy who's now the head of NASA and forever I heard we were going to Mars and everything was about Mars. And now here we are, you know, like, and the moon's back in vogue and NASA's back, baby. So help me understand what's the mission and what should we be listening to going forward?

'The mission changes with administrations, to be frank, right? But this has been a long-lasting effort. But if you go back in time to the 90s, there have been administrations. George W. Bush, we're going to the moon, right, and it just takes time for it to all shake out. You can't predict what direction the government is going to go in with the new administration. You know, for the most part, there is a cooperation with the past sometimes, but then you have these moments where the direction changes. But I think that we are invested to a point now where this humans in space moment will continue forward. I think we will achieve our goal.

Okay, so right now it's just about us getting ourselves in space, not us sending robots to Mars. Like you're saying people are back and the moon is back.

People are back and the moon is back and Mars and asteroids are the next step after this moon endeavor gets established in a stable way. And also, there's a lot going on in low Earth orbit. You have companies like Planet Labs, SpaceX, or Elon Musk's Starlink. You know, so there's a lot happening in Earth orbit and there's a lot that's going to be happening on the moon and it's all about establishing an infrastructure just like America required railroads and highways space needs to build its railroads and highways.

And they're cops. I have to say, we did not even, and we won't get into the space force, which is a branch of the military, you know, that someone's got to populate at some point.

You know, it's one of those things, you know. It's one thing. Well, here's what I'm saying, you know, back in the 80s, America illustrated its ability to shoot down a satellite, right? The Chinese have illustrated their ability to blind and shoot down satellites. So even though the militarization of space was something that was on the hush, it was quietly occurring, right. So it's not just the inspiration and aspiration. There are geopolitical consequences to this space endeavor. And so what does that mean? You want to get the high ground first.

It sounds like, and I guess this is a good thing, all these years after the end of the shuttle program, we are at the start of a new chapter.

Absolutely. We are at the start of a new chapter. We are pushing a new frontier and this is just the beginning of what's to come.

Well, thank you so much for talking with us. We really appreciate it. Best of luck.

Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor.