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Sept. 3, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:11:33

Edition 480 - David Whitehouse

An exclusive 70-minute conversation with ex BBC Science Editor David Whitehouse on his excellent new book "Space 2069" about the amazing next half century of space exploration...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Still Howard Hughes and this is Still The Unexplained.
	Coming to you from London Town, thank you very much for all of your emails.
	Couple of shout-outs coming up, so stand by if you've emailed me recently.
	Most emails I either see, read a note, or if they require some kind of response, then I make sure that they get a response as required.
	If you want to get in touch with me, you can go to my website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam, and you can follow the link and send me an email from there.
	And if you'd like to make a donation to the ongoing operation, then that's right.
	I'm surprising myself all the time here.
	Then you can do that through the website too, theunexplained.tv.
	Follow a PayPal link from there and every donation gratefully received if you have donated recently to the upkeep of this show.
	Thank you very much from the bottom of my heart.
	The guest on this edition is somebody we've had on a few times before, Dr. David Whitehouse, former BBC Science Editor, who wrote that definitive book about Apollo 11 and the Apollo program last year.
	He's followed it up with a look ahead.
	That was a look back 50 years.
	He's now looking ahead to 2069 and where will we be in space?
	The results of his research may surprise you.
	They're coming up here on the unexplained.
	I love all of this stuff.
	I hope you do too.
	David Whitehouse here.
	Let's say hello to a couple of people.
	Richie, who's always decorating, it seems, when these shows are playing.
	Richie, I hope it's all going well.
	If you'd like to come and do some decorating for me, I am useless at it and need all the help I can get.
	Nancy, thank you for your concern recently.
	My ear problem is ongoing, but I'm going to see a specialist next week about that.
	But thank you, Nancy, for your concern.
	Ian, who says that my podcasts are like a box set.
	I don't know whether that means you consume them once and then you take them round to the charity shop or something else.
	Ian, I know what you mean.
	Thank you very much.
	Dennis, thank you for your suggestion.
	Not sure how I can contact the person that you suggested, but I'm going to give it a go.
	Thanks, Dennis, for your ongoing support.
	And Steve O'Neill, nice to hear from you.
	If you've emailed recently, thank you very much.
	Thank you to Haley for booking the guests for this show.
	But above all, thank you to you because you are the rocket fuel who make it all happen.
	Now, the weather.
	Just going to mention that briefly.
	For those who don't like me talking about the weather, tune out now.
	We had boiling, baking temperatures here in the UK recently.
	Looking out the window now, we have got monsoonal rain.
	It is August.
	What is going on?
	We're having storms here.
	Nothing like, I have to say, the storms that hit the United States.
	And my thoughts are with you if you're there.
	But we don't get storms in August here.
	It's all very, very weird.
	Anyway, that story's to be continued.
	Let's get to the guest now.
	About 45 miles southeast, no, southwest of where I'm sitting.
	Dr. David Whitehouse, his new book about space in the year 2069, I think will fascinate you.
	David, thank you for returning to the Unexplained.
	How are you?
	I'm fine, thank you.
	And you?
	Oh, I'm all right.
	I mean, we're 45 miles apart, and I think probably the weather is as grim and evil looking there as it is here.
	Strange weather.
	I mean, as a man of science, David, this has been the weirdest summer, hasn't it?
	It has, but then again, weather is weird.
	The thing about weather is that climate is the overall average of what you get, but weather is the ups and downs of variation.
	And yeah, you get weird amongst the normal.
	Well, can you ever remember in your lifetime, and our lifetimes are a similar kind of length, can you ever remember a run of weirdness quite like this?
	Now, I know you lived for probably longer in the South than I lived in the South, but I still, even though I was up north for part of it, I don't remember it being quite like this.
	Well, I don't know, because we tend to forget very easily, don't we?
	Remember a couple of years ago, we had six months of very dry weather, and we were worried about the reservoirs being empty.
	And then we had six months of incredibly wet weather, and they all filled up again.
	So, yeah, there's always weird.
	That's the thing about nature.
	When you have patterns and randomness and signal and variability, you inevitably get weird.
	So, in the words of a singer who had a hit single in 1986, I think, I can't remember, isn't it?
	Bobby McFerrin, don't worry, be happy.
	Is that right?
	Don't worry, be happy.
	I mean, there is a long-term change.
	We are one with them we used to be.
	But these variations, it's so, they can be explained, I believe, in terms of natural variations.
	But who knows what's going to happen in the future?
	Well, indeed, I mean, we've got enough to worry about as we go into the winter, haven't we?
	What, with COVID and everything else?
	I don't even want to think about that.
	I think the stuff that I talk about on the unexplained is a little bit of an, and my listeners appreciate this too, is an escape from all of those mundane concerns and all of those things that politicians claim that they have answers for, and they really don't.
	Because you cannot forecast uncertainty.
	You've just been talking about uncertainty with the weather.
	You know, this is going to be, whichever way you look at it, an uncertain period that we're going into.
	So maybe we should park that part of the conversation there and get to talk about the good stuff now, the space, David.
	You wrote what I consider to be the definitive book about Apollo because it was a book that kept me enthralled.
	I mean, for a start off, it was a book that I read.
	Now, I have to tell you that I've been spoiled for all of my life and career for reading.
	Journalism, broadcast journalism, spoils you.
	You speed read everything.
	I read your book on Apollo, and I don't, you know, I tend to skip through everybody's books.
	You know, I just pick the main points out of them, and they're gone.
	Your book, I went back to.
	It's been a big success, hasn't it?
	It's been very pleasing because, as I think I said, I wasn't going to write a book about Apollo 11 because everybody else was writing books about the anniversary.
	And as a writer, you think, well, that's going to cut down the number of people who are going to buy my books.
	But no, it came out and it became the book of the anniversary.
	And I'm thrilled that it did so well and grateful that so many people like yourself really liked it.
	Well, I did, and I was also pleased to do what I'm doing with this, to be one of the first, among the first, to interview you about it.
	It was very much unlike this book, though, because the Book of Apollo was a book of people's stories, the human beings involved in these things.
	And of course, looking into the future, we don't know who the human beings in the main will be.
	So you have to tell the story in a slightly different way.
	So I get the sense that the way that you wrote this, the style of writing of this, looking ahead the next 50 years, you consciously made a decision to do it differently.
	Well, that's right.
	It came out of the idea of a sequel to the Apollo 11 book, because it's always nice when the publisher comes to you and says, would you like to write something similar but different?
	And so I thought I'd take 100 years and not 50 years after the Apollo 11 moon landing.
	And the interesting way to write that is because you can have great fun not only starting now and looking forward, but you can also place yourself at various points in that 50 years and look back and look around you.
	So there's a bit of fiction in it, hopefully informed fiction, like the book starts off at the anniversary of the 100th anniversary of the moonland.
	Yes.
	And then it goes through, it goes in some stages onto the surface of Mars with people.
	So you can have great fun with the narrative because I sort of tend to think that not only should you inform the reader, but you should keep them reading and keep them entertained because nobody's forced to read the book.
	They can put it down at any time.
	And as somebody said, if people don't want to read your book, nothing will stop them.
	So you've got to actually entertain.
	And I think one way to do that is to play around with the timeline.
	Because if you're going to write about, say, a voyage to Mars, then it's one thing saying they will do this, they will do that.
	But I think it's better and more interesting if you'd actually describe what it's like on the spacecraft as if you were there.
	And that made it a bit more difficult to write.
	But I think a much better read than a dry, straightforward explanation of technical specs.
	Yeah, I also liked the way that you didn't go for a straightforward down-the-line chronology.
	You leapt around it a bit, and that made a lot of sense.
	In fact, that kept me interested.
	That was the thing that kept me interested because you kept...
	And then suddenly I was hooked in again and back we go.
	I think it's brilliant.
	At the beginning of the book, you say, the next 50 years will see the start of our divergence.
	By the end of it, the moon and Mars will have their own people for whom Earth has never been their home.
	Some will become exiles, unable to visit Earth because its gravity would kill them.
	Some will become a new branch of humanity regarding themselves liberated from the confines of the planet of their predecessors.
	That sets out your stall, doesn't it?
	Yeah, because you're quite right.
	Because the next 50 years is going to be the story of going back to the moon and going to Mars.
	We're not going to do, I think, other things than that in terms of human spaceflight for the next 50 years.
	That's enough.
	And yes, by the end of it, I imagine that the colony on the moon will be flourishing and the colony on Mars will be surviving.
	And there will be people who live on these colonies who came from Earth and who stayed there a sufficient length of time that they may not want to come home, they might not regard the Earth as home anymore, or they may not be able to come home because they've chosen to stay so long and the rigors of the voyage to Mars are so great and the gravity of the Earth is much greater than they would have been used to,
	that I think there will be some which will say, no, I'm staying here.
	And I can understand why they would want to.
	And in fact, there are, and we'll talk about these, there may be in some cases physiological reasons why they couldn't come back here.
	Problem with predicting the future or looking into the future, dipping into it as you have.
	You quote very apositely Sam Goldwyn, the famous movie mogul who was noted for his Goldwyn-isms.
	And my favorite is, which is very useful in broadcasting.
	A verbal contract is not worth the paper it's written on.
	But one of his others was, predictions are difficult, especially about the future.
	Yeah, that could be a Goldwinism.
	But it's been attributed to a few other people.
	And I couldn't really get to the bottom of who actually said it.
	But it sounds like Goldwyn.
	It's as good as Goldwyn gave us.
	And that's right.
	I mean, you look into the future.
	You look at, you know, the next few years, the next 10 years are fairly well established, I think, because of the projects that are going on.
	But then when you get to sort of 2035 and onwards, you then sort of think, well, this is getting far enough that the time could be a little hazy.
	Like I set the first going to Mars in the late 2040 or so, or the early 2040s.
	Now, that could easily slip another five years or another 10 years, or indeed it could not happen at all.
	So you're constantly aware when you're trying to write about the future, you are, if you like, giving a hopeful future, but with the caveats that we may well decide when we get to the moon that all the other problems, all the other politics which seem to be growing these days mean that this thing will not happen as one predicted.
	I mean, look back in 1969.
	Exactly.
	You know, we thought we'd be on Mars ages ago, but we weren't.
	And that's a good point to get into.
	And I think we have to do a little bit of the timeline.
	And you look at it through the eyes of presidents.
	Nixon, for example, said, I've decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of systems and technologies Designed to take American astronauts on landing missions to Mars.
	So initially, Nixon was the president who was not as keen on it all because, you know, Apollo was in its dying phase towards the end of his presidency.
	But then he says, we're going to Mars.
	Then Reagan takes a completely different look at it.
	He sees it all, we know this, as Star Wars.
	It's all about defense.
	But equally, under his administration, just as Nixon, it wasn't all that it seemed to be.
	In 1988, the Reagan administration called for the expansion of human presence beyond Earth orbit.
	That's a big declaration.
	Then with George H.W. Bush, things coasted along with him.
	And then we got Clinton, and then we got Obama.
	Now we've got Donald Trump at a completely different look at things.
	But various presidents have, in a way, spoken with a forked tongue about space, haven't they?
	Because they've taken, like for example, Nixon there, who didn't appear to be so keen on it towards the end, but under his administration, there's a commitment to doing it.
	Sometimes what they say is not what is happening.
	Well, isn't that a surprise about politicians?
	You're quite right.
	Particularly with Nixon, you have to read the runes as to what he was thinking and what he was saying, because, as you implied, they were not the same thing.
	He was not an Apollo fan.
	He knew darn well when he was making announcements about expanding human presence to go onto Mars and into space.
	He knew darn well that he would not have to face this, face raising the money for this.
	It would not affect his presidency, but it would affect future ones, which he may not like.
	And he only focused on himself, on his own administration, as we know so well from his particular history.
	He spent far too long worrying about his position and not enough time doing things.
	So President Rick Nixon said what people, some people wanted to hear, and the devil to the consequences.
	So he oversaw the running down of Apollo.
	He needed money for elsewhere.
	It was Vietnam, it was the Tet Offensive, it was the poor people's marches in America.
	He knew damn well that he could make a speech, but the real decision was made in Congress when they voted for the money.
	And Reagan, Reagan was a fascinating, well, let's get Jimmy Carter out of the way.
	He didn't do much for space.
	Reagan was fascinating because he, as you say, he saw space in terms of an arena of conflict between the superpowers.
	But slowly over his presidency, he began to get the, quote, vision thing.
	And that was when the space shuttle started to fly regularly into orbit.
	And he did become a space fan at the time.
	But money was a problem.
	He was asking for money for Star Wars, which was a highly controversial program.
	And to his successor, President Bush, Bush was a bit of a space cadet, but he had no power.
	I mean, I remember watching him giving a speech on the steps of the, I think it was the Smithsonian or was it the Air and Space Museum with the crew of Apollo ever next to him.
	And he said, you know, in 20 years since Apollo landed, we're going back to the moon and we're going back to stay.
	And like all the projects up till now, it set off with good intentions, a good design.
	It would have worked had it got the money.
	But after a year, you know what happens?
	Congress, who gives the money to the project, says, do you really need all that?
	Can we take a billion or two off the top?
	We need it for something else.
	So it gets top sliced.
	And that forces the project organizers to extend the timetable because they can't do what they wanted in the time available.
	So after a couple of years of that, the money available to do things is much less.
	And it's going to take them far longer to get to the moon anyway.
	And eventually, the system collapses and they give up.
	And they did that three times until the last few years when amazingly, President Trump may have forced NASA to get a move on.
	Isn't that amazing?
	Well, it is.
	I mean, I'm looking here.
	I mean, all presidents seem to create some kind of new space body.
	And Trump created his own.
	And the aim of this one, whatever it's called, you'll know the name, a U.S.-led integrated program with private sector partners for a human return to the moon, followed by missions to Mars and beyond.
	I mean, he couldn't have said that better had he been Buzz Lightyear.
	It's got all the tick box words of the current age, hasn't it?
	Private partnership with private companies, let them pay for a lot of the development.
	That's been successful so far.
	I mean, look at Elon Musk.
	Elon Musk, with his SpaceX and his Falcon rockets, have captured now the market to put satellites into low Earth orbit.
	The main player in that game.
	And they made NASA look slow.
	They look very slow compared to what Elon Musk was able to do with the private company over 10, 15 years.
	And the hope is, of course, that the project of going back to the moon, Artemis, is run by NASA, but they buy in services from SpaceX and other companies will build capsules and landers and rockets.
	That in the past, NASA was more closely involved with big aerospanies managing the project.
	And I think SpaceX shows the way to go because although when they developed the SpaceX capsule, the Dragon capsule, which works fabulously, NASA was sitting alongside them with the tech specs, but they basically learned to let SpaceX go away and do it and not interfere.
	And that proved very successful.
	So a lot of the probes which are going to land on the moon over the next few years are private companies that NASA buys the finished product.
	And that's the way to do it.
	That would be the Way to put a base on the moon and perhaps even go to Mars that way.
	You quote Neil Armstrong.
	I know everybody does when we talk about the moon, but he says, there are secrets on the moon, there are things to see beyond belief.
	What do you think he meant?
	Well, he was aware that all the Apollo astronauts landed in broadly similar places around the equator of the moon, although the latter missions were slightly higher latitudes to go to interesting geological features.
	But he was aware that there were other regions of the moon which were different, which it was not possible with the Apollo capsule to land on because that went into an equatorial, the system went into an equatorial orbit, and your ability to move away from the equator was very limited.
	When we go back to the moon, and it's only four years away, 200 weeks, would you believe, that we will go back to a very different place.
	The plan is to go to Shackleton Crater on the South Pole of the Moon.
	Shackleton has become, and not a great many people have heard of it, but it's become the most important crater on the moon, the most studied crater on the moon, because it's at the south pole, which has advantages in terms of solar power, because you don't get two weeks of darkness as you do at the equator, but also it might have in these dark shadows, eternal shadows, basically, which have accumulated ice.
	And going back to the South Pole and looking for the ice is the theme of the moon base for the next 10 years.
	I want to get back to the American mission, of course.
	But the Chinese are interested.
	They've already sent Chang'e-4 with what you call a daring mission, which it was.
	Two orbiters and two landers under its belt.
	You say China is wasting no time in its plan to explore and colonize the moon.
	So they have a plan that is separate.
	And even the Russians, whatever happened to them, they have a moon plan.
	Well, it's very interesting.
	The Russians do have a plan, but I think Russia's in long-term space decline.
	It's been a declining space power ever since.
	I mean, you can trace back the lack of interest of the Soviet government in the space program back to the late 80s, early 90s.
	And that's why programs such as their space shuttle, Puran, Snowstorm, as they called it, a copycat of the American space shuttle, didn't get anywhere.
	It flew, but it wasn't developed.
	They didn't have the money.
	They didn't have the backing.
	They didn't have the impetus to get on with it.
	And had it not been for their cooperation with the Americans on the space station, then Russia would be literally nowhere at the moment.
	And I can't see it getting its act together for a long time.
	But China, as you say, that's very different.
	China sees itself as the great superpower of this century.
	And its plans for a few decades to be number one means that because of its pride, it's a sort of ticket to the Great League of Nations, if you've got a space program.
	And China's developing its capabilities, its technology in space.
	And I have them being the great rivals to the United States over the next few decades.
	And certainly, if the United States, well, they will go back to the moon and probably onto Mars.
	China, I imagine, will have their own parallel programs.
	I envisage a period when there's an American and a Chinese base on the moon and even a Chinese base on Mars not far away from the American base.
	So the story is now no longer, as it's been for the past few decades, what is America going to do?
	There is a new rivalry and China is going to be a very serious player.
	Yet when America arrived on the moon in 1969, they said we come in peace for all mankind.
	And yet here we have the same kind of splits and factions starting to develop on the moon with China going their way and maybe the Russians going their way, but definitely America going their way.
	The idea that we're doing it as humanity has gone out the window, hasn't it?
	Oh, yes, certainly.
	I mean, I don't know what phrase people will use when they land on the moon, but it will certainly be.
	I mean, a number of times I've spoken to NASA in various roles about cooperation.
	And NASA's look at cooperation is, yes, we'll cooperate with you, but we call all the shots.
	We decide what goes.
	Look what happened when NASA cooperated with Europeans on the Hubble Space Telescope.
	Europe spent a lot of money and hardly got to look in.
	And that's going to be the case with America.
	They're very difficult to cooperate with.
	But China's going to provide a great incentive for them because they And Charlie Bolden said, well, you know, I think rather the way we're going at the moment, it's going to be the Chinese who are going to get to the moon first.
	And there's going to be Chinese boots before American boots.
	And Charlie Bolden said, well, that doesn't bother me.
	And the honorable member for Texas stood up and said, well, it sure the heck bothers me.
	You know, I'm not going to take this.
	And that started a movement, as if you like, to get a move on, which Trump capitalized on.
	But the story of the next few decades is going to be the moon and Mars, and it's going to be America and China.
	And with China becoming economically more powerful, it may well have more money to spend on space.
	And remember also that the technology is getting easier.
	You know, we've got better computers, better simulations of things.
	We've got better materials to make spacecraft.
	Our computers can simulate trajectories much easier.
	It's now, if you've got the money, not so much a technology development exercise, except when it comes to the craft you travel to Mars in.
	It's now within reach of people who've got the money because the expertise is there amongst our emerging Information processing computer technology.
	I'm going to sound like an exam question now.
	Looking at NASA, what kind of crude lander then do you think that there will be?
	If we think back to the lunar module, we were all amazed that the lunar module just seemed to be made out of aluminium or aluminum, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on.
	Foil.
	Is the next generation of landers, because it will depend on the landers who will be the pathfinder for the mission to Shackleton?
	What will they be like?
	Well, they'll have much in common with Eagle because there are certain design constraints.
	You have to be as light as possible.
	You have to be strong for the landing because landing on the moon, although it is predictable, it's the last few kilometers that's the tricky bit.
	NASA has already got three contenders for the first few missions, which are going to be landing in 2024 and then yearly from then on for a while.
	They've got two private companies which have got very respectable designs, and they will choose from that.
	But they also chose SpaceX, I think partly to give SpaceX a bit of money to develop their technology further.
	I don't think SpaceX is going to win this.
	But the landers they've got are high-tech, computerized.
	They will rely on craft, landers, unmanned landers, which have been placed near the landing site before.
	So they will be coming in, homing in on a beacon, and they will be flying over unexplored terrain, flying into the south pole of the moon.
	Nobody's ever done that.
	So the landers are very impressive at the moment.
	The only thing, the only problem is the time scale over which they can be developed.
	But I've no doubt that if Biden, if he gets in, doesn't chop the space program, that we will get one of those landers and then the alternative one the year later, landing in 2024.
	They're impressive creatures.
	But we will then start a process of learning how to live on the moon.
	We've only been on the moon for three days at a time.
	The one month that astronauts could stay at Shackleton Crater, with assisted by, eventually sitting by a rover, exploring the rim of this crater, is going to see, you know, in the first week, 10 days of exploration, more data, more science coming from the surface of the moon than in all the Apollo missions.
	And it's going to be quite amazing to watch how that colony, that beachhead builds up over that time.
	But landing on the moon, we've got the capsules to go to the moon.
	We've nearly got the capsules to land on the moon.
	That to me is, you know, if technology goes on at the rate it is doing at the moment and the development and the money is available, I've no doubt that these landers will be up to it in a couple of years' time.
	I love it when you talk about the practicalities of doing it, because I got pictures in my mind of what all this would look like.
	You say for the first few Artemis missions, the crew will live inside the lander, but soon the time will come to build on the moon.
	And in order to do that, I never thought about this.
	There'll be an awful lot of use of 3D printing.
	So we go back to that thing that we're not inventing things necessarily now.
	We're capitalizing on technology that we already have.
	Well, that's right.
	If you look at the old plans for lunar bases, particularly those that were going to be put at the lunar equator, they are aluminium tubes.
	They were made on Earth, they were welded on Earth, they were taken up to space station or into low Earth orbit, and then they were taken to the moon and dumped on the lunar surface.
	They're then probably covered in lunar dirt to give them extra radiation protection.
	We don't have to do that now.
	We don't have to carry these great hunks of metal as much because the Japanese are particularly good at this.
	They've got 3D printers, which, you know, you literally put the materials on one side, you put the 3D printer, it's like a robot arm, next to it, and then it builds a house.
	And then you come back two days later and the house is built.
	It's done everything.
	That would be the case.
	The case would be on the moon, you would try and use the lunar dirt, lunar soil, and treat it in some way by adding chemicals to it to turn it into a paste that will solidify.
	And you literally, like a tube of toothpaste, you clear the ground and then you start constructing, if you like, an igloo with this toothpaste.
	And then after a while, you will then go into this igloo when it's partially made, and you will inflate the internal of it, which will already have the connections for air, for water, for recycling, for life support.
	It will already have the furniture in there with shelves and beds and data cables.
	And then you will finish this off around this inflatable structure.
	And once you build several of those, you can then link them together.
	And you will then have igloos on the moon.
	And they will be the basis of, I suppose, increasingly sophisticated 3D printed places to live on the moon.
	And that's presumably what we will also do on Mars.
	And again, it comes down to practicalities at that point.
	We have to learn about, as you say, digging, drilling, and driving on the moon.
	that's right understanding the moon is You can live in your capsule, and that's perfectly all right.
	But if you want to have a longer, long, a capsule cannot stay on the surface, you know, all that long because there will come a time when it's not able to take off again.
	It has a limited lifetime.
	The rockets will be only guaranteed to work for a certain length of time.
	So you want to keep the rockets coming and going.
	So you need a base that's on the moon.
	And yes, we're going to have to learn how to shift lunar soil.
	We're going to have to learn how to dig it.
	We're going to have to analyze the chemicals.
	Well, we basically know it's basically there's oxygen in there.
	There's metals in there.
	Basically, if you take lunar soil, it's a pile of metal, different types.
	So you can extract things on it, you can use it as a material on its own.
	Where there is oxygen, you can take the oxygen out.
	We'll be able to build protection for radiation by piling up this lunar regulus over the man-made structures there.
	And yes, it will be mining on the moon.
	It'll be difficult.
	The first thing we'll have to do is to work out a landing pad because it's been worked out that when the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon, they scattered this dust and small rocks everywhere.
	In fact, some of it escaped into space.
	And now if you do that and you're landing next to a sophisticated spacecraft or a rover, you're going to smash into smithereens.
	So you've got to find some way of either building a wall around a landing site or you've got to sinter or smooth out the surface so you can land without scattering so much dust.
	That needs to be done.
	Then you need to talk about transport across the surface.
	How are you going to take material from the supply craft to where it's needed?
	So you might have rovers, you might have tractors, you might even have a small monorail to do that, particularly if you want to get inside a crater.
	And all this is going to be tricky because lunar dust is harsh and abrasive and it destroys tires and gears.
	And we're going to have to learn and take our, I suppose, our Bruce Willis experience to the surface of the moon to learn how to, as you say, move things, shift things and dig things up.
	And we can all remember that the lunar rover, on the original Apollo missions, it went as far as the nearest rise or the edge of the nearest crater.
	And that was about as far as they went.
	To go 20 kilometers or more, they'll need something that's got, just like the movies, a pressurized cabin.
	It's got to be much more sophisticated.
	Yeah, this is part of the book which I had great fun because can you imagine as a lunar explorer getting into an SUV pressurized, you can live in it, rather like the one that Mark Watson is.
	It's Mark Wahlberg, isn't it?
	Yeah, you drive across.
	Yeah, it's like that, driving across the lunar surface exploring.
	And in part of the book, I actually think that they're going to start off from Shakoldun Crater, this amazing south pole region of the moon.
	And they're going to drive along, and I worked out the routes.
	They drive along the rim of this crater and that crater.
	Then there's a small plane.
	Then there's the amazingly high Mount Malaput, which they could drive up and look at the view from that would be spectacular.
	So it will be, I think, while we're establishing a colony on Mars in the 2040s and the 2050s, we will start having lunar tractor colonies moving across the surface of the moon, making the most amazing discoveries.
	These caravans, examining the geology and all the other science around there.
	Boy, would I love to see a dash cam from one of those vehicles as it drives across the moon.
	That's what we can look forward to.
	That would be just, I mean, hopefully I'll be around to see it.
	But those type of explorations, stuff of science fiction, you know, are within our imagination now, provided we have a colony on the moon.
	It's amazing that it's happening.
	And you talk about the resources of the moon, the idea that there might be water, ice, but also the moon has helium-3 that could be a good source of energy.
	This is interesting because helium-3 is useful for fusion reactors and it produces, if you've got enough helium-3, it produces a great deal of fusion energy.
	In fact, I think you would only need the space shuttle's cargo bay worth to power the United States for a year.
	It's very high density energy fuel.
	The problem with helium-3 is that it's not very concentrated on the moon.
	It's there, but you have to dredge and extract vast quantities of lunar soil, some of which would not be very deep.
	So you'd have to scrape away at the surface for tens of square kilometers, possibly larger than that, in order to extract this stuff.
	And we could do that, but it's one of those things in space, like asteroid mining, whereby it's a great idea once you get started, and you can see how to make money once you're there doing it.
	It's the people who try and do it first that are going to lose their money.
	So eventually somebody's going to make a lot of money out of that, and I'm sure we will do it.
	But how to get there?
	Because there are people with good ideas who will build the first craft, who will try it out on a small scale, who will get some success, I expect, but then will fail to get the money or the impetus, or the big boys will move in then to actually exploit what's possible.
	So everybody knows that's a possibility, and it often features in books.
	It's been one of the uses of the moon.
	But it's one of those things which, I suppose, is going to be very difficult and is always for the next generation.
	But we may think differently about that when we actually drive around the moon and look at the place.
	And then we come to the question that you look at, fascinatingly, of what we will do there.
	And one of the things that we will do there, you say, is uninhibited radio astronomy that could be useful to us in all kinds of ways, not only helping us to map the stars, but also to help us seeing incoming threats better than we can now.
	That's right.
	The moon's got lots of science you can do.
	And we could hark back to the days of the 50s and 60s when the military were very interested in the moon.
	And one of the themes of the book is the military interest in the moon and in the space around the moon, cislunar space, as it's called, would be very interesting.
	There was a satellite a few years ago, a communication satellite, that malfunctioned and didn't get into the right orbit.
	And it virtually disappeared.
	And then it ended up around the moon.
	And the satellite controllers were able to bring it From the moon, back down to near the Earth, and put it in an orbit where it could be useful.
	But the thing they realized is that this satellite, a communication satellite, when it was moving in these large orbits around systemic space, they found it hard to track.
	And that didn't go unnoticed among the military.
	The military now realize that the space around the moon is the ideal place to put hard-to-track or untrackable assets to observe the Earth, to monitor the Earth, to monitor your enemy from space.
	And both sides, China and America, are working on these hidden orbits.
	And so we may take our conflicts up to the region of the moon sometime in the next few decades, probably much sooner than that.
	Because if you've got an aggressive satellite weapon, say, in low Earth orbit, everybody knows where it is.
	And it can be a target for a satellite weapon or a laser beam.
	You put it a bit higher up around the moon where it can still get to low Earth orbit when you command it.
	It's untouchable.
	And that's going to be irresistible for the military planners of the next few decades.
	So we have militarization.
	Inevitably, we have politics up there, which is a little depressing for some of us, but I guess we're human beings and that's inevitable.
	Lastly, then, before we move on to talking about Mars, and there are similar and related but different issues there.
	How will it be constituted for people who live and work on the moon?
	Mars is a different case because it's a lot further away.
	But of course, the moon is, you know, we tend to think of the moon these days as being in our backyard.
	Does this mean that crews will spend periods on the moon and then come back for a bit of furlough?
	There's a phrase to conjure with at the moment, a little bit of furlough here on Earth, and then they go back to spend another six months or whatever it might be on the moon.
	Is that how it's going to be?
	Yeah, yes, I expect so, because at the moment, nobody wants to live on the moon permanently.
	They probably wouldn't be allowed for a long time.
	You would have crews spending their time four, six months, perhaps even a year on the moon, because we have to get experience of being away from low Earth orbit for long periods to practice and get information for the voyage to Mars.
	So yes, there would be a rotating crew.
	By 2069, I imagine there would be possibility hundreds, possibly more people living on the surface of the moon.
	And there would be transport craft coming to and from the moon, delivering supplies, possibly arranging for some of the lunar water to be removed from the moon and taken elsewhere to fuel satellites.
	There would be a lunar colony.
	It would be, actually, I envisage the lunar colony as being not quite as big as the one on Space 1999.
	You know what I mean?
	Yes, I do.
	So there would be people living there.
	It would be three or four days away from the Earth.
	So there would be places where they could go if they needed to hang out to be rescued.
	There would be a lot of the facilities which would make use of the reduced gravity of the moon.
	So yes, you would have, as you can, you know, we can all sit down and imagine what a moon base would look like.
	But I think by the mid-2030s, we will have many people living on the moon, rotating on the moon, with Americans and the Chinese in different bases, at different places.
	And, you know, kids could log on to the lessons from space, from the surface of the moon.
	And we could even have these virtual reality helmets, which we could put on, and it would show us what it's like to be standing at the south pole of the moon.
	And there's a value in that information.
	That information would be very valuable to computer gamers and to movie makers.
	Yeah, so there's money to be made.
	If money to be made even just in images.
	That's right.
	So I expect we would have a colony on the moon, and it's certainly going to be a heck of a lot easier to have a self-sustaining colony on the moon with not self-sustaining in terms of the fact it doesn't need the earth, but in terms of longevity, in terms of people coming and going all the time.
	That's going to be actually a piece of cake compared to putting one on Mars.
	Well, yes.
	Now, you have a description of Mars, and you say Mars is not like the Earth or the Moon, especially not like the Moon.
	It has craters and canyons, mountain ranges and deserts with shifting sand dunes, but they're more than analogues of similar features on Earth.
	Mars has made its own world using things it has in common with the Earth.
	And I've never thought of it in that.
	That's a beautiful way of putting it.
	Mars has made its own world, similar to, but quite unlike.
	Yeah.
	I mean, the short way to say that is Mars is Mars.
	Mars is not a type of Earth.
	Mars is not, you know, the Earth, but a little bit different.
	So if you go to Mars thinking what you have to do to survive and land on Mars is similar to what you do on the Earth, but you have to modify things a little, then Mars is going to kill you because Mars is an alien world.
	It's had a different root in life.
	We understand the conditions and we have to work with obviously the conditions that are there.
	And thinking it's a little bit further than the moon, thinking that it's like the Earth, but the atmosphere is slightly different and the gravity is lower, it's going to kill you.
	You have to have a whole new respect for the alien world that Mars is.
	But as you say, Mars, the Moon is an outrigger world of the Earth.
	Mars is the first true world of the cosmos.
	We recognize things on Mars.
	We understand a lot of the surface of Mars.
	And so going there, if you have the right attitude that it is a heck of a lot more serious than going to the moon, is the only way to survive.
	I mean, there's one scenario, I thought about putting this in the book, where the colonists die on Mars.
	You know, they crash land, or the supply craft don't get there, or they have a catastrophe at the base they're Setting up and they all die.
	And how would we respond to that?
	Would we go straight back?
	Or would there be a hiatus and we might not go back in the next 50 years?
	That's a possibility.
	I took a more hopeful line than that, but I still anticipate that getting to Mars and landing on Mars.
	There'll be a price.
	There'll be a price.
	You're right.
	There'll be a human price.
	There will be disasters.
	Well, you say in the book, some of the colonists of 2069 cannot return home.
	There are many graves on the red planet and in the space along the colonists' route.
	So, you know, people are going to die in pursuit of this dream.
	Exactly.
	People die going up at Mount Everest even today.
	People die crossing the oceans.
	People die, you know, trying to get to the moon as part of the program to get to the moon.
	Every time you push further, there is a price to be paid.
	And Mars is a much, much further push than anything we will have ever tried before.
	And requires a different mindset.
	You say in the book for many new Martians, the sun is an unnerving sight, strangely shrunken with no warmth.
	Now, people have to be psychologically prepared, I would imagine, to go there because some of the things that you will see and endure would freak some people out.
	Not only if you're on Mars, and, you know, you could, as I say, you could climb a hill on Mars, and you can travel more in a straight line on Mars, back to where you are, along a straight line than you can on the land of Earth.
	So this, and in each valley, each desert, each canyon you come across, you will not find anything human, or indeed anything really alive.
	So it is an isolation of which we have never had before.
	But also the voyage there, the actual surviving the voyage, the actual getting on with your colleagues.
	It's amusing and, I suppose, tragic that when people have done Mars simulated voyages in the sense that they've locked people up in pretend spacecraft and said you're not coming out until the length of time it takes to get to Mars and they've been given tasks to do, they don't get on.
	You know, very few of these Mars analog missions, the crew haven't come out biting, screaming at each other.
	And what are we going to do about that?
	Because if you go and join a company, and I've worked for a few, where you don't get on with some of the people there, you can leave.
	If you're on a mission to Mars, there's nowhere you can go.
	That it is unnerving.
	You're quite right.
	Because if you set off for Mars from low Earth orbit, within hours, as you travel out and you haven't even got to the moon, your abort options reduce to zero.
	You are going whether you like it or not.
	Even as you sail past the moon and you think that's next to the Earth, there's no way you're going to turn around and come back.
	You are committed to about 200 days there and 200 days back and then add on the bit what you do in the middle, whether you land or whether you orbit or just fly by.
	And the isolation of the Earth becoming so small, you know, a blue dot in the distance, and the fact that time takes, the light travel time for a conversation gets longer and longer and longer as you go to Mars, nobody has ever experienced that, ever, obviously.
	And if we're selecting a crew, what is an optimum crew, six, eight, ten, and expecting them all to get on with each other, indeed giving them space and privacy and the communal areas they will need and the command structure on Mars is going to be,
	in my mind, the most difficult thing because we can understand a lot of the technology about space, but it's the effect on human psychology and the human body that is really the final frontier for getting to Mars.
	If you judge by what people have come back from the space station as after a year in space, they are wrecks.
	They are severely damaged.
	Well, you quote one person.
	I've never read this before.
	I've forgotten the name of the person you'll know.
	But the person who returned, sorry, Scott.
	Yeah, Scott.
	Scott.
	Says, every part of my body hurts.
	All of my joints, all of my muscles are protesting the crushing pressure of gravity.
	I'm also nauseated.
	So you spend a period up there, it's going to have effects on you.
	Big ones.
	Yeah, that's right.
	And if, for instance, we, this is why I have in the book, The First Mission to Mars is not a landing mission.
	The first mission is like Apollo 8.
	It's see if you can get there and get back and how to survive and understand the human body.
	Because currently, if you send somebody on a 200-day voyage to Mars, and then you expect them to be at the peak of their performance, to land on Mars, and landing on Mars is more difficult than any other world we could land on.
	Expect them to have the concentration, the physical resilience, the performance, the attention to land on Mars, set up a colony, and then take off again.
	At the moment, that would be too much.
	They would not be able to cope with that, and it would be a disaster.
	So that's why I have the first voyage to Mars as a mission to explore the journey and not the planet, because I can't see any other way to do it.
	So who is going?
	And who has a plan to fly by?
	And who has a plan to stay?
	Who are the runners and riders?
	Well, we don't know at the moment.
	The America Space Program, of course, has it as a goal, but it's spending very little on it at the moment.
	And it's a good thing that I think going to the moon and setting up a settlement on the moon, it is a very good thing that that has a lot in common with setting up base on Mars.
	And so we can learn a lot about what to do on Mars from what we do on the moon.
	The voyage, you know, has to be technology, understanding the human body.
	So America will decide to go to Mars, I think, later on this decade when it's Set up on the moon, and it starts to see its way ahead.
	Right.
	A year or two ago, we were given the impression, sorry to butt in, but we were given the impression by some that all of this was happening quite soon.
	And by the sounds of it, it isn't.
	It's not happening quite soon.
	You're talking about Elon Musk and his Starliner spacecraft that's going to take thousands of people to Mars in a few years' time.
	And he's going to set up colonies.
	And by 2069, there'll be a million people living on Mars.
	Well, I'm sorry.
	He's built a lot of good rockets and they work superbly.
	But when it comes to sending people to Mars, masses of people to Mars, in that rocket, he is way too optimistic, way, way too optimistic.
	If you look at that rocket, sure he's got a big rocket, but Mars, sending thousands of people to Mars, it's about life support.
	It's about keeping them safe from solar radiation.
	It's about communities in space.
	It's about feeding them.
	It's about getting rid of the waste.
	It's about giving them somewhere to sleep.
	It's about what do you do when you get there.
	All these things are details that are going to take decades to sort out that he doesn't talk about publicly.
	So he's on a bit of a wild fantasy, I think, when it comes to setting up colonies on Mars as big as he thinks and as soon as he thinks.
	So that's why I put in the book.
	I said, look, you've got to be, there's a dose of reality here.
	Basically, you were saying that Elon Musk and his ilk are maybe a little optimistic.
	Yeah, they certainly are.
	No disrespect to them for having plans and ideas and for their achievements.
	But I think Mars is a lot more difficult.
	And Jeff Bezos has said this.
	Jeff Bezos, who has got, who is part of the return to the moon in a way that SpaceX isn't at the moment, he said that space is the arena whereby, to paraphrase him, whereby an outlandish and amazing statement doesn't get criticized.
	You can get a lot of publicity from hype.
	And I think that's probably behind Elon Musk's great plans for this.
	They're not realistic.
	But of course, who's going to say that to Elon Musk when he launches into these flight of fantasies?
	And perhaps it's typical of people who have big ideas and big dreams.
	And without those things, he would probably not be where he is today.
	I guess that's how some successful people become successful.
	But there are all kinds of things to overcome.
	You said that there are physical difficulties, physiological changes, loss of bone density, the effects of radiation, all of these things.
	Do you think that we will be going to Mars hoping, and we probably will, that we adapt over time to these things?
	Or do you think that we will be engineering people who are prepared for this before they go?
	It'll be a bit of both.
	We'll have to have a Mars analog mission in orbit around the Moon where people stay in orbit of the Moon for the length of time it takes to go to Mars and come back.
	Because at the moment, people on the space station are protected by the Earth's magnetic field from the harsh radiation.
	So we have to understand radiation.
	And we do not know what the sun can throw at us.
	The sun could throw at us something far worse than we've ever expected or experienced.
	And therefore, the crew will need protecting in some way, not only physical shielding on the spacecraft, but also in terms of medicine and drugs.
	And it may well be that some of our drugs will activate some of our genes in different ways.
	Curiously, there is an eyesight problem that astronauts suffer from in weightlessness, which only affects men.
	Is it what that's about?
	Exactly.
	It's very interesting.
	So, you know, who knows?
	Perhaps we would just send an old female crew to Mars and why not, you know?
	Well, in fact, one of the first people to be on the moon, we already know will be a woman.
	The next person, the 13th person on the moon will be a woman, yes.
	So there's protection from radiation, there's coping with zero gravity.
	You know, there's the spacecraft itself.
	I came to the conclusion that a rotating spacecraft, like the one in 2001, where part of it is spinning to give a feeling of artificial gravity, will be essential.
	Because although it's engineeringly more difficult than just having a normal spacecraft with people floating around, even if you've got only lunar gravity, a third of a gravity in the rotating arm, if you slept in that arm and you slept for a third of the time,
	that might just give you enough time and ability to recover from the rest of the time you spend in zero gravity.
	And you might have to spend on the return journey longer in the rotating arm just to help your body get back and prepare for coming back to Earth.
	So I came to the conclusion that you're going to need some form of spacecraft, not so much the whole spacecraft which rotates, but part of the spacecraft with some sleeping quarters perhaps, rotating in order to give them artificial gravity.
	I couldn't see.
	Well, I came to the conclusion that if you want to adapt the human body using medicine, drugs, and genetic modification perhaps, to zero gravity, then that's the hard way to do it.
	The easy way to do it was to give them a bit of gravity, give them a bit of planet Earth on the way there.
	Because if you can solve that, you solve a lot of problems.
	But of course, there is the radiation.
	As I said, in the book, I deal with the radiation problem.
	And that, you know, when you go between the planets, you've never done this before.
	And the sun has cycles of radiation, of activity.
	But bad luck for us is that when the sun is quiet and the so-called flares on the surface are less, and its radiation that it throws out into space is slightly less, radiation In terms of particles, not in terms of light.
	That's one thing.
	But the big storms, the big flare-ups that will do the real damage don't seem to obey that rhythm.
	So even if you think the sun's well-behaved now, we can nip across to Mars and back, and we've got a couple of years to do it, that's still a dangerous prospect because the sun can still wake up and throw out an enormous bunch of radiation, even when you think it's well-behaved.
	So there's no absolute guarantee, as you've already said, that we are definitely going to get there and get there in one piece.
	It may well be that we lose missions on the moon.
	That may be the case.
	Nobody who signed up for a mission to Mars, and there will be no mission ever like this, will go without knowing the real truth.
	But then again, I suppose that's the case for astronauts.
	I've known lots of shuttle astronauts.
	And although there is a great romance and a great enjoyment, and it's wonderful, and it's fabulous for them to go into space, to a person, they know that they knew it's not totally safe.
	And that there are times when you're in space or ascending or re-entering the Earth's orbit, re-entering the Earth, when things can go wrong and you will not escape with your life.
	That will be doubly, trebly, infinitely more the case for the crew that go to Mars.
	So, you know, the selection procedure for Apollo was rigorous.
	It's going to have to be even more so.
	We haven't really decided where to land even, have we?
	We could land where there's ice, which is mid-latitudes, or we could go where there's a bit of an atmosphere, and that means nearer the equator, low points.
	That's right.
	This is a debate that's going on and probably will go on for a long time.
	The thing about Mars is that the lower down you get, obviously the thicker the atmosphere.
	So if you go down to the base of the Valley of the Mariners, you're going to have a thicker atmosphere than if you stay up on one of the plains, the high plains.
	And yet it's a high plains, as you said, that has the ice, which could prove to be a vital source of resource for the colony.
	But there are some places lower down which might have ice.
	But the problem with Mars, as the space probes that are going there know, and space probes in the past have realized when they've crashed, is that landing on Mars is a real pain.
	It's not like landing on the Earth where you can have a heat shield and then parachutes and you can go all the way down, either into the ocean or with a little bit of thrust a few seconds before you land to take the edge off the velocity.
	Mars' atmosphere just doesn't cooperate because it's high and it's thin.
	So once you've got over the heat shield problem to lose most of your velocity when you're coming into land on Mars, you then, if you deploy a parachute, the parachute will not slow you down enough before you crash on the surface.
	So you have a parachute for a while, then you have to get rid of the parachute and do something else.
	In the past, one probe covered itself with inflatable balloons and bounced.
	Others have used things called sky cranes, which have rockets which stop their descent and lower them onto the surface.
	So you're going to need a three-pronged manned craft, or crewed craft, as I suppose I should say, with a heat shield that can withstand, like the space shuttle, that can withstand high temperatures in the upper atmosphere.
	You may need parachutes, and then you will need thrusters.
	So this makes the landing on Mars much more complicated than landing on the moon or coming back to Earth.
	That's going to be something that will need to be practiced, that will need to be understood.
	And there are designs for the first crewed spacecraft to land on Mars, and they look totally different from lunar craft and the space shuttle.
	They are large, they are tall, and they're very impressive.
	But whether or not that's the way to do it, you know, is going to be part of the next 20 years of research.
	Last question about Mars then.
	Is this one?
	If we discover next year or the year after, and we're told about it, that there has been or there might still be life on Mars, to quote a great title, is that going to change the nature of the mission?
	Well, I'm sure we'll be told about it.
	In a way, yes and no, because I don't think if we find life on Mars, we're going to say we can't go there.
	We're going to go to a specific place and we'll have, well, Mars will force this upon you.
	You'll be isolated and your influence will be relatively local.
	Therefore, you're not going to disturb any ecosystem or any ancient living things on Mars globally.
	So yes, we will still go back.
	We may go back to a region which is within driving distance of a place where we think there could be life because the rovers which are going to Mars are going to be fascinating, but nothing compared to what a human could do if they went up and started digging and analyzing and looking for the same type of life as might be found in the next geoscope.
	So it won't stop us.
	We'll have to be very careful.
	We'll be very careful generally when we go to Mars because we have to sterilize everything as much as we can.
	And in the book I have one colony on Mars whereby there is a geological exploration region next to the base, but there's also a region which is cordoned off where there might be life.
	And they have special protocols and special equipment and special things to do when they're approaching that region.
	Certainly finding life on Mars would be absolutely wonderful.
	It would be showing us life can survive on two planets at least for a while.
	If the life on Mars is similar to the life on the Earth, then we may even think about life being spread between one planet and another.
	And it may well be that we on Earth came from life that originated on Mars and that spread to the Earth by rocks which got between Mars and the Earth.
	But life on Mars died out or went into dormancy.
	We are Martians and we're going home in a certain respect.
	a number of people have suggested.
	Yes, that's right.
	So this is an example of the part of the discoveries we could make, which will change everything, which are just mind-blowing.
	Mars, if you think the moon is a world of wonders, Mars, I'm sure, has got more things in store for us than any other object in the solar system.
	I totally agree.
	With the possible exceptions of some of these icy ocean moons further out, but Mars is such a delicious world that perhaps you could almost argue philosophically, it's going to take the best of us to get there and explore us.
	So if we manage to conquer Mars, I don't think we'll ever conquer Mars, but reach an accommodation with Mars.
	Then you talk about beyond.
	And let's just talk quickly about what happens beyond that.
	Do we go to Jupiter?
	Do we go to one or more of the exoplanets that we keep discovering?
	What's the next phase?
	Well, I'm sure in terms of unmanned, uncrewed exploration, robots, that by 2069 will have been all over the place.
	We'll have sent artificially intelligent robots.
	We'll mass produce them and they will be thrown into comets.
	They will crawl over the glaciers of Mars.
	They will crawl over the surface of the strange moons of Jupiter, the volcanoes of Io, because they won't be destroyed by radiation.
	They will go down the cracks of the strange Saturnian moon Enceladus and explore the under-ice ocean, the warm under-ice ocean that got there, and see if there are signs of life there.
	It will explore the distant worlds.
	But as far as humans getting there, I see that as a big problem, because Mars is the outer limit as to what we can physically attain at the moment.
	The voyages to Jupiter and beyond are not only are the worlds full of radiation, but also the length of the voyages are sufficient that we haven't got the ability to keep people alive.
	Indeed, if you're going on a voyage to Jupiter, you could talk about six or seven years there, six or seven years back, depending upon the particular orbit.
	And that makes even a Mars voyage seem like a brief trip.
	Right, so unless you can put people into stasis, that's not really a runner.
	That's right.
	That could be the way.
	That could be the possibility.
	But that's a whole new ballgame.
	And I should imagine people standing on Mars and looking outwards and thinking that humans out there is going to be a millennia later, and that we might be more interested, as you say, in actually going to the worlds around the nearest stars after we've been to Mars.
	At the very end of the book, you quote Tennyson.
	It's a nice touch.
	And if you don't mind me reading it, this is it.
	For I dipped into the future, as far as human eye could see, saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.
	Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argassies of magic sails, pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales.
	Lovely point to end it all on there, David.
	I'm not sure how you came up with that quote, but it was a good point to end it, I think.
	Thank you very much.
	And did you like the very last line?
	Because I think the very last line in a book is an important place.
	And to me, from the very start of the book, I was working towards the very last line.
	And do you want to read it?
	Will I be giving it away if I read it or do you want to read it if you want it?
	I don't want to give it away because it says a lot.
	I've got it here.
	It says, if this is the right one, you tell me.
	In 2069, the Earth will be in the evening sky of Mars, with the moon visible through a telescope.
	The future Martians are making their plans.
	Soon, they'll be roving over its red dust, sometimes listening to the obligatory soundtrack that will accompany all its explorers and all its new horizons and peoples.
	Look at those cavemen go.
	I love it, and we know where that comes from.
	That's incredible.
	Excellent.
	And also, you also go back to War of the Worlds.
	I think the future Martians are making their plans, or maybe I've just gone a little far with that.
	You can't write a book about Mars without a bit of David Bowie or H.G. Wells creeping in.
	I love what a beautiful last paragraph, last line.
	And lots of good reviews on the back, too.
	Fast-paced and tremendously readable.
	That's from the BBC.
	Nice of them.
	All about space, the most authoritative book ever written about Apollo.
	That was your last book, wasn't it?
	And White House has a reporter's gift for uncomplicated storytelling, which you demonstrate again in Space 2069.
	A completely different book, but rather lovely.
	And some nice photographs in here, too.
	You know, you must have a source for these things, David.
	But I'm just looking at one now, actually, Cracks in the Icy Shell of Saturn's Moon Enceladus.
	That image is stunning, as are many of the others.
	Well worth reading.
	I greatly enjoyed it today.
	And when I get more time, I'm going to read every single word rather than skim through it.
	Congratulations, David.
	Thank you very much, Howard.
	And the book is called Space 2069.
	It is published, I'm going to do your bit for you, by Icon Books.
	And I'm very pleased to have done one of the first interviews about this.
	David, as I say, good luck, and I'm sure it's going to be a big success.
	You're very kind, Howard.
	It means a lot to me.
	Thank you.
	The remarkable Dr. David Whitehouse and my thanks to him for giving me his time.
	The book is now available.
	Check it out.
	It's Space 2069, and it is a great read.
	I read it through this morning and was delighted with it.
	David has that great skill in writing that a lot of broadcasters do.
	He writes conversationally.
	It's something that when they train you to be a journalist for broadcasting, they knock all of your long words out of you and they make you write as people speak.
	And they would, I can remember being in classes where somebody would write something and the people in charge would say, I've read what you wrote.
	Do people really speak like that?
	I think there are one or two people on TV and radio news right now who need to go back to those basics, but that's a whole other story before I get myself into any more trouble.
	More great guests in the pipeline here off The Unexplained Online.
	So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, And above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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