Has NASA Ceded Its Mission To Elon Musk?

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Speaker 2 This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.
What happens when a billionaire has more control over America's space program than the agency that put a man on the moon?

Speaker 2 Franklin Fore, a staff writer writer for The Atlantic, has written a new piece titled, The Man Who Ate NASA.

Speaker 2 It traces how Elon Musk, through his company SpaceX, has become not just a partner to NASA, but in many ways its replacement. Last year alone, 95% of rocket launches in the U.S.
came from SpaceX.

Speaker 2 That includes missions for the Pentagon, for intelligence agencies, and the International Space Station. And now the power shift is accelerating.

Speaker 2 Just this week, nearly 4,000 NASA employees, that's 20% of its workforce, opted to leave under the Trump administration's deferred resignation program.

Speaker 2 The administration has also proposed slashing NASA's budget. Fore argues that these moves signal something larger, the dismantling of NASA as a symbol of American idealism.

Speaker 2 For decades, the agency embodied the belief that through public investment and collective effort, we could accomplish the impossible.

Speaker 2 Today, Fore writes, that vision has been seeded to private ambition, and in its place is a space program increasingly shaped by Elon Musk's obsession with colonizing Mars.

Speaker 2 In addition to being a staff writer for The Atlantic, Franklin Fore is also the author of several books, including The Last Politician, Inside Joe Biden's White House, and the struggle for America's future.

Speaker 2 Franklin Forer, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Speaker 3 So great to be here.

Speaker 2 So let's talk about the latest news. 4,000 of NASA's employees have opted to leave.
That's 20% of the workforce, which sounds pretty massive. How significant is that number to the overall agency?

Speaker 3 It's crushing on several different rounds. The first is when you walk down the street, you see people wearing NASA t-shirts, toting NASA tote bags.

Speaker 3 You don't see this for the IRS or the Social Security Administration. NASA is something that inspires idealism, and it inspired idealism in its workforce.

Speaker 3 I, over the course of reporting this piece, got to spend time with a lot of NASA employees who were really worried about the future of their agency in the Trump administration with all the looming cuts.

Speaker 3 And I think they felt like they could work anywhere in the world.

Speaker 3 They were the best and the brightest, and yet they chose to work at NASA and take a lower salary because they felt that they were doing something incredibly important and they were working in this magical organization.

Speaker 3 And what the budget cuts that have come down on NASA have signaled to those employees is that that idealistic mission is not going to continue. It's not going to be this magical place.

Speaker 3 And I think a lot of employees just decided rather than suffer through this squeezed, cramped mission that's been imposed upon them, where a lot of NASA's scientific ambitions have been stripped away, they'd rather leave and go somewhere else.

Speaker 3 And I think it's really a tragedy that reflects this broader tragedy that's befallen the American government, where we're just, we're hemorrhaging all of these people who are extraordinary with their talents and extraordinary in the fact that they decided to devote those talents to the United States, even though there were opportunities in the private sector that would be much more lucrative for them.

Speaker 2 Since you've talked to so many NASA employees, former and current, I want to know what this feels like on the inside, considering, as you said, many of them volunteered to leave.

Speaker 3 It's incredibly painful. It's anguishing for them.
I sat around a table with a group of NASA employees earlier this year, and they'd come to Washington to lobby

Speaker 3 Congress to protect their agency, to preserve their agency.

Speaker 3 And I just was so struck by how committed and devoted these people were to the idea of NASA and the fact that they feel like NASA can't be its old self and that rather than stay and fight for this thing that they deeply care about, they're just going to concede defeat.

Speaker 3 That to me is just,

Speaker 3 it's achingly sad to witness.

Speaker 2 I'm just curious. You said that they've decided to go other places, but NASA is pretty much a one-of-one when it comes to this kind of work here in the United States.

Speaker 2 This massive number of folks who are leaving, they're all over the country. Where are they going within the private sector?

Speaker 3 Look, the private sector is robust. There are certain things that NASA does that can't be replicated anywhere else, not in academia, not in the private sector.
NASA's pursuit of science is singular.

Speaker 3 But there is a robust aerospace community in the United States. There are all these companies.
A lot of NASA's work over time has been passed through contractors and middle organizations.

Speaker 3 And so it's possible to go work for those other organizations. Some of the people will go to work for SpaceX and work for Elon Musk because it's an exciting place to work as well.

Speaker 3 There are all sorts of startups in Silicon Valley hoping to capitalize on an emerging space economy.

Speaker 3 So it's not like they're not alternative places to work other than NASA, but NASA was a place, NASA is a place that has a special kind of idealism, that had a special kind of mission, and that was devoted to certain projects that really can't be replicated elsewhere.

Speaker 2 I mean, Congress has been back and forth. The Trump administration has been back and forth regarding cuts.
And I was curious: were these cuts always in the Doge plan?

Speaker 2 Or did Trump make this decision after he and Musk fell out?

Speaker 3 It's interesting. If you go back and you look at Project 2025, there's not a chapter devoted to NASA.
And Doge didn't initially descend on NASA.

Speaker 3 It felt like it might be protected territory because of its relationship with Elon Musk.

Speaker 3 But there are other forces in the Trump administration, and one of those primary forces exists in the Office of Management and Budget, which just hopes to kind of cut across the board.

Speaker 3 NASA is interesting because NASA was engineered, if you will, to be a politically impregnable entity. That NASA's workforce is actually not concentrated in Washington.

Speaker 3 It's dispersed across the country at all of these different bases. Those bases are connected to politicians who lobby on behalf of jobs that are important to their local economy.

Speaker 3 There is this aerospace lobby that's incredibly powerful. And so there's part of NASA that is very, very hard to cut.

Speaker 3 And that part of NASA that's hard to cut has actually managed to survive the early Trump era fairly intact.

Speaker 3 So everything within NASA that is devoted to human spaceflight, you know, more or less persists. And in some instances, maybe even got more funding in the Trump budget and the Big Beautiful bill.

Speaker 3 But there are parts of NASA that have to do with science, and those have been hit exceptionally hard. And so, you know, we need to reflect on the fact that NASA did all of these things.

Speaker 3 It's not just about dicking astronauts on the moon or going to Mars, or it's not just about space shuttle and the International Space Station. It's about telescopes.
It's about satellites.

Speaker 3 What NASA does is it stares back at the planet. It has tracked deforestation.

Speaker 3 It's tracked climate change, both the things that make it vulnerable to ideologues on the right who want to shut that down. It stares back into the deepest history of the universe.

Speaker 3 It's inspired kids to go into the sciences. Those are the parts of NASA that are vulnerable and that have fallen prey to the Trump budget.

Speaker 2 I want to get into the power that Elon Musk holds within the U.S. space program.
And I want to quote something from your piece.

Speaker 2 You say, as the United States lost confidence in its ability to accomplish great things, it turned to Elon Musk as a potential savior and ultimately surrendered to him.

Speaker 2 First off, Franklin, what do you mean when you write that the U.S. lost confidence in its ability to accomplish great things?

Speaker 3 We go back to the Apollo program, which is really launched in the spirit of ambition at the height of the Cold War.

Speaker 3 It was intended to be this demonstration project that showed that you could get 400,000 people, which was the number of people who participated in constructing those rockets at the height of the program, to work in sync to create technologies that had never been constructed before to go places that we'd never gone before.

Speaker 3 And that was kind of the peak of a certain American idealism. And after the 1960s, we continued to go to space.

Speaker 3 We launched the Space Shuttle program, but it was a kind of zombie program where we thought we were doing something important, but there was no clear goal.

Speaker 3 We began to outsource a lot of our capacity to defense contractors, so it wasn't the government actually doing this.

Speaker 3 And if we just step back and we look at this trajectory, it's like the United States says it wants to do big, ambitious things in space, and it invested a huge amount of money in doing them, but it wasn't doing it with a goal that was inspiring.

Speaker 3 It wasn't doing it in a way that demonstrated the competence of the government.

Speaker 2 Because it had ceded its power to contractors. And so this brings us to the early 2000 with Elon Musk.
He's just been pushed out of PayPal as the CEO. He's got money.
He's bored.

Speaker 2 And like you write, he's looking for the next big thing. He even goes to Russia to try to buy missiles.
And how did that wild search then eventually lead him to NASA and really to starting SpaceX?

Speaker 3 So Musk grew up reading sci-fi. And a lot of the sci-fi novels that he read depicted a hyper-rational engineer who swoops in to save society, save humanity from an apocalyptic collapse.

Speaker 3 And he begins to decide that he wants to do something in this realm of space. And so he goes and he tries to buy rockets.
And in Russia, a very drunken dinner goes badly.

Speaker 3 He was clearly being ripped off. And so he decides that he's going to start to build them himself.

Speaker 3 He's very disillusioned when he starts to do this because he thinks, oh, NASA must be on its way to Mars right now. And then he goes and looks at NASA's website and sees no mention of Mars.
And

Speaker 3 he decides he's going to do the hardest thing. Now, rich people are very attracted to space.

Speaker 2 Right. This is nothing new at this time.
There are lots of billionaires who are investing in technology, thinking about trying to be the first to go up there as a private citizen.

Speaker 3 Exactly, because it signals status. There is no harder thing than going into space.

Speaker 3 And so billionaires like to imagine that they can invest in this hobby and they can demonstrate to the rest of the world their superiority by doing the hardest, most expensive thing.

Speaker 3 And so Musk sets out to do this. And in 2002, he founds SpaceX with this kind of wildly implausible idea that in a suburban Los Angeles warehouse, they're going to cobble together their own rockets.

Speaker 3 Now, it's plausible to do that because the technology of rocket engineering doesn't really advance that much over time.

Speaker 3 It's just a question of being able to do it cheaper, more efficiently than the people who did it last. And Musk stumbles ultimately on this amazing idea of building rockets that are reusable.

Speaker 3 And we have to give Musk and SpaceX their flowers because it is an amazing company. He was able to figure out ways to build rockets cheaper, more efficiently.

Speaker 3 If it meant buying tools on eBay in order to build a rocket, he was willing to do that. If it meant

Speaker 3 cutting steps out of the process, he was willing to experiment with how that, and he was willing to take risks that other people weren't willing to take. And so he failed a lot in his early years.

Speaker 3 And his tolerance for failure meant that he was able to persevere when others weren't.

Speaker 2 And the government at that time was also kind of enamored by this kind of move fast, break things approach of tech entrepreneurs because for years, as you write, they kind of been working with other behemoth companies that had their own bureaucracies to contend with, like Boeing and Northrop Grumman.

Speaker 2 So I'm just thinking about that as it relates to your reference to the 1960s and 70s where we were seeing NASA make mistakes in real time and get through them.

Speaker 2 This was something that was kind of appealing to the government. It's the start of why Musk received so many contracts early on.

Speaker 3 Aaron Ross Powell, right. So if we think of this as a play in three acts, in the first act, the government is able to develop expertise of its own.

Speaker 3 In the second act, it turns to these defense contractors who are kind of enmeshed in the military-industrial complex, who are able to do big things, but they're also clunky bureaucratic entities.

Speaker 3 And then in the third chapter, the government turns to Musk because he is the scrappy startup who's the promise of doing things cheaper, faster than those defense contractors.

Speaker 3 And as you say, this is happening in the 2000s. SpaceX is not a product of Donald Trump.
It's a product of the Bush administration. It's a product of the Obama administration.

Speaker 3 And in their frustration with the defense contractors and in their desire to have something service the International Space Station as they begin to retire the clunky program that is the space shuttle, they have to turn somewhere new.

Speaker 3 And Musk Musk and his rockets offer this promise that they can build and operate rockets that can go back and forth between Earth and the space station without having to rely on those old defense contractors, without the government having to build its own rockets.

Speaker 3 The government can just be a passenger on Musk's rockets.

Speaker 2 You mentioned that last year, SpaceX handled 95%

Speaker 2 of all rocket launches in the United States, which sounds also like a staggering number, but I'm trying to put this in context of NASA relying on private contractors for decades up until that point.

Speaker 2 Kind of put that number in context for us.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, Right. So this is not just about Musk's relationship with the government.

Speaker 3 It has to do with the fact that at a certain point in the history of his company, he comes to this realization that launching things into space for the government is never ultimately going to be that profitable.

Speaker 3 It's never going to get him enough money to be able to do the thing that he dreams the most of, which is going to Mars.

Speaker 3 And so he decides that he's going to create a company within SpaceX where he's going to launch satellites that are going to provide internet back to people here on planet Earth.

Speaker 3 And so a lot of the satellites that he's launching are part of

Speaker 3 Starlink, this company that he's created that is part of SpaceX. And so I think that that accounts for the huge number of rockets that he's launching.

Speaker 3 But there's one other thing to be said, which is that part of SpaceX's dominance in the market has to do with the fact that it is launching stuff all the time, unlike other companies.

Speaker 3 So you take Blue Origins, the Jeff Bezos company, which is theoretically a rival to Elon Musk. He has adopted a kind of a go-slow approach where he doesn't launch things all that often.

Speaker 3 But because Musk and SpaceX are constantly sending things into space, they're learning a lot more than his rivals. They're collecting all of this data.

Speaker 3 They're hiring the best engineers because the best engineers want to be at a place where they're constantly involved in this exciting project of sending things into space all the time.

Speaker 3 And so it's created this virtuous cycle for SpaceX where

Speaker 3 because of the volume of its launches, its dominance just continues to accelerate.

Speaker 2 I mean, Starlink,

Speaker 2 it seems to be indispensable for the military and for communications purposes. A few years ago, we were talking about the war in Ukraine in those early days of the invasion.

Speaker 2 SpaceX rushed to supply Ukraine with Starlink terminals, helping them to replace their communication systems.

Speaker 2 What makes this alarming is that it seems like Musk can decide at any time, right, to shut down Starlink, and we're so dependent on it. Is the government basically at his mercy?

Speaker 3 I mean, I think it's probably a little bit of an exaggeration to say the government is at his mercy, but he's clearly demonstrated that in this one instance in Ukraine where he wanted to turn off Starlink in order to shape the course of a war, he was able to do that.

Speaker 3 It's not just humans communicating,

Speaker 3 it's armies communicating, that space has become this most important domain in warfare because of the existence of satellites.

Speaker 3 It's this way in which Musk's dominance and the importance of space end up just compounding over time, which is that the more satellites that we put into space, which become indispensable to armies communicating with one another, to the ability of the government to surveil its enemies or to track ballistic missiles, space just becomes more and more important, which makes SpaceX and Musk more and more important.

Speaker 3 Most of the contracts that SpaceX has with the government are ultimately through the Pentagon or the National Reconnaissance Organization.

Speaker 3 A lot of them are classified, so we don't actually know the full details. So it's hard to really wrap our minds around this essential place that Musk holds.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Okay, so you said me saying that the government is at his mercy might be an exaggeration. But what would happen right now if Elon Musk were like, I'm out?

Speaker 2 You know, like if he threatened to pull Starlink satellites or stopped SpaceX, like what would happen?

Speaker 3 Aaron Ross Powell, well, as it happens, we have a little bit of a test case here, which is that Donald Trump and Elon Musk had this romance, which ended up crumbling.

Speaker 3 And it crumbled very acrimoniously with all sorts of accusations where Trump threatens to possibly deport Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, where Musk threatens to stop supplying the International Space Station.

Speaker 3 And Trump says, I'm going to cut off all of your your contracts.

Speaker 3 Well, the government went and they looked at all of their contracts with SpaceX, and I think that they determined that they couldn't really break up with Elon Musk, even if they wanted to, because they're so entangled, they're so dependent, and there is no real rival that could replace the essential services that SpaceX provides.

Speaker 2 Our guest today is Franklin Forer, staff writer with The Atlantic. His latest story for the September issue is titled The Man Who Ate NASA.
We'll be right back after a short break.

Speaker 2 I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.

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Speaker 2 Franklin, you open this piece with this fantastical story. It's kind of a sci-fi prophecy about Elon Musk's name and a German engineer who was known as the godfather of NASA.

Speaker 2 Can you briefly share that story?

Speaker 3 Right. So Werner von Braun was this German rocket engineer who worked for the Nazis and was building rockets for them using concentration camp labor.

Speaker 3 And the United States decided that his his expertise was so valuable that they recruited him. They brought him here.
They ultimately parked him at a base in Alabama.

Speaker 3 And he began building rockets for the United States. Von Braun was like Musk himself,

Speaker 3 very monomaniacal, very obsessed with going as far as we could into space. And really, the biggest prize that engineers like Musk and von Braun imagine is going to Mars.

Speaker 3 And in the late 1940s, von Braun wrote a novel called Project Mars. And he imagines what life would be like on the red planet.
And he describes the government that would take hold on the red planet.

Speaker 3 And it's the most bizarre thing. But when he describes the beneficent dictator, who he imagines will run Mars, he gives him a title, and that title is the Elon.

Speaker 3 And Musk's father, Errol, I think, kind of speciously, because I'm not sure how he could have found out about this, likes to say that one of the reasons that he bestowed this name on his son is because he'd encountered it in this book.

Speaker 3 But it's a really strange coincidence because I think Elon Musk, when he thinks about his destiny, he clearly imagines being the Elon that Werner von Braun wrote about in his novel.

Speaker 2 What is his vision of life on Mars?

Speaker 3 First, we should say life on Mars, objectively, would probably be pretty terrible. It's a completely uninhabitable planet.

Speaker 3 Somebody at his company referred to it as a fixer-up planet, and that's really kind of a hilarious understatement because at night, the temperatures plunged to minus 225 degrees Fahrenheit.

Speaker 3 If you walked around on the surface of the planet without a spacesuit, your skin would start to peel off. Within 30 seconds, your blood would start to boil.

Speaker 3 Even if you were wearing a spacesuit, we haven't engineered a spacesuit that is hermetically sealed enough to prevent radiation and the small particles that exist on the planet from seeping in.

Speaker 3 Life on Mars would be utterly miserable. But for Musk, it would be incredibly sublime because it's this chance to start over again.

Speaker 2 You say re-engineer humanity.

Speaker 3 It's funny when Musk talks in this sort of way, he's echoing a vision that his grandfather had.

Speaker 3 His grandfather lived in Canada and began to worry in very crankish, racist ways about the decline of Christian white civilization. And he moved to South Africa to start over.

Speaker 3 So, this idea of confronting civilizational collapse and going to a new place to start over is baked into the way that Elon Musk thinks about the world. It is his inheritance, if you will.

Speaker 3 And, you know, he thinks that we could use technology in a very social Darwinistic way to create a new species. And this is something that he talks about in other companies.

Speaker 3 His company, Neuralink, imagines creating direct communication between the human brain and computers, which would be this new species, this new cyborg species.

Speaker 3 And by going to Mars, he's very oblique in the way that he talks about it, but he has talked about selectively reproducing in order to create a species that is better adapted to a Martian environment.

Speaker 2 And this is not also based on his own image.

Speaker 3 Exactly. This is a concept that he actually lives in his own life, that he's very worried that the people who have the highest intelligence aren't reproducing quickly enough.

Speaker 3 And so he set about doing this in his own life. He, according to the Wall Street Journal, has 14 kids spread across at least four different mothers.

Speaker 3 And he's determined to personally do his part to regenerate the species by replicating his own intelligence.

Speaker 2 There's also this line that's just very chilling in your piece.

Speaker 2 You say he wants to create on Mars a place where colonists will be insulated from the ravages of war, climate change, malevolent AI, and all the unforeseen disasters that will inevitably crush life on Earth.

Speaker 2 So it's a very dystopian future that he is preparing for, that is much like his, as you mentioned, his grandfather.

Speaker 2 He doesn't use racist language, but this selective engineering indicates that he's talking about a species that is very much, as you said, in his image.

Speaker 3 Right. He's kind of flirting with eugenicist concepts here.
And there's a slippery way that he has of talking where he hints at certain things.

Speaker 3 There's always kind of an impish wink when he says some of these things as if he's just saying them in order to provoke. But the thing that's clear is this.

Speaker 3 He's borrowed from science fiction this idea that humanity is doomed, that there's going to be some apocalyptic scenario that's going to befall planet Earth. We don't know what it is.

Speaker 3 It might be a malevolent AI. It might be climate change.
It might be that the Earth just suddenly explodes. It might be nuclear war.

Speaker 3 But humanity needs to create this safety valve for itself in the form of a Martian colony.

Speaker 3 Since we don't know when Earth is going to disappear, we need to urgently begin building this now in order to preclude that worst-case scenario.

Speaker 2 Let's take a short break, Franklin. If you're just joining us, my guest is Franklin Forer, a staff writer for The Atlantic.
His latest story for the September issue is called The Man Who Ate NASA.

Speaker 2 We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is fresh air.

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Speaker 2 You talked about the origin of NASA with our president, JFK, how initially he wasn't particularly enthusiastic about space exploration, but changed his mind during the Cold War.

Speaker 2 The space race, as you said, was about global prestige, a zero-sum competition with the Russians.

Speaker 2 I also, though, want to talk to you about kind of the other side of that, because I think that it really is important to think about like all of the other opposing forces of the space program over time.

Speaker 2 There were a lot of social and political forces in the early 60s and real pushback from some Americans. Can you talk about the critique of the space program at that time?

Speaker 2 What were people saying about how national resources and attention were being used?

Speaker 3 To get to the moon, we spent an insane amount of money. It was

Speaker 3 probably something like $28 billion in 1960s money, which amounts to $300 billion in today's dollars.

Speaker 3 And there was a phrase that the sociologist Amata Izioni popularized decrying this expenditure where he described a moondoggle.

Speaker 3 And I think, especially among civil rights organizations, there was a sense that this was just an unjust expenditure because on earth, there was so much suffering.

Speaker 3 And $300 billion and and all of that government expertise, if it had been spent on that suffering, would have done real long-term good as opposed to this ephemeral achievement of having gone to the moon.

Speaker 3 And by the time the 1970s roll around, that becomes something close to an entrenched piece of conventional wisdom that we couldn't continue that massive expenditure indefinitely into the future.

Speaker 2 In his memoir, Lyndon B. Johnson wrote, quote, if we could send a man to the moon, we knew we should be able to send a poor boy to school and provide decent medical care for the aged.

Speaker 2 And what's remarkable, Franklin, is that vision tied space exploration. It really did tie it kind of to the broader public good.

Speaker 2 Today, that conversation feels very different. You mentioned Jeff Bezos' company, Blue Origin.
They recently sent Gail King and Katy Perry and others on this 10-minute space tourism flight.

Speaker 2 And Elon Musk is focused on colonizing Mars. It kind of feels like a big departure from the original spirit of the space program.

Speaker 3 Johnson is really fascinating because he views the kind of the organizational mission of NASA, just accomplishing all these tremendously hard things as proof of concept for the great society.

Speaker 3 People doubted the ability of government to do big, ambitious things, but by proving that government could do the biggest and most ambitious thing of them all, he felt as if he was establishing a template that could be applied to other areas of American life.

Speaker 3 And that turned out to be maybe the empty promise of New Deal, great society liberalism. That Kennedy would say we do hard things because they're hard.

Speaker 3 And he would talk about how we would bear any burden in a way that was very circular logic. And it wasn't something that we could actively transpose to the domestic social terrestrial realm.

Speaker 2 Franklin, what does the reshaping of America's space program mean for other programs throughout the world?

Speaker 3 So the United States right now is actually engaged in a second space race with China.

Speaker 3 And I think that that is the thing that is driving a huge amount of the investment that even the Trump administration is making into NASA, that there's a race right now to go back to the moon in order to plant a flag there to get there before China gets there, to be able to create some sort of permanent structure there.

Speaker 3 And I think this is all being done in a very different tone than the way that America engaged in the Cold War space race.

Speaker 3 That in the Cold War space race, we really were trying to prove something to the rest of the world about our beneficence, that we came on behalf of all mankind.

Speaker 3 And there were treaties that were signed that space wouldn't be militarized, space wouldn't be commercialized.

Speaker 3 And right now, in this current space race that we're engaged in, where Musk is at the forefront of America's efforts, we really are engaged in something that is philosophically quite different.

Speaker 3 That the United States is extremely excited about the possibilities of commercializing the heavens, of exploiting the heavens for rare earth minerals, for unlocking the industrial possibilities of space.

Speaker 3 That when it comes to militarization, we really do want to establish dominance in the heavens, that we understand that the next massive war could be fought in space.

Speaker 3 So rather than creating this literal space above us where there was the possibility that we could do better than we had done on our own planet, we're merely replicating a lot of the worst parts of what we've done to this planet.

Speaker 3 And we've ceded any sense that there could be this utopian possibility for moral evolution in the heavens. Aaron Ross Powell,

Speaker 2 are we headed towards a future where the entire space program is privatized?

Speaker 3 You look at the initial budget that Donald Trump submitted and the programs that he wanted to cancel, there would have been a point in the not-so-distant future where the United States government was no longer engaged in owning and operating vessels that could take us to space, and that there would be a period where everything would phase out and the only plausible entity left would be SpaceX.

Speaker 3 And over the horizon,

Speaker 3 When you look at the priorities for the American space program, we're going to go back to the moon. That's happening.
That's a project SpaceX is involved in, but it's not exclusively a SpaceX program.

Speaker 3 But when it comes to getting to Mars, which is the thing that the President committed to in his inaugural address, and it's now a bipartisan piece of American policy as it relates to space, there's really only one person,

Speaker 3 one company, that's developing the vessel that gets us to Mars, and that is SpaceX. It's a starship.
It's going to be the most powerful rocket ever built.

Speaker 3 And he hasn't demonstrated that it's fully operable yet, but he's applying the full resources of his company to make it happen. And he's almost willing it into existence.

Speaker 3 And when that happens, whether the government is on board with the program of getting to Mars or if it's just a Musk-driven thing, there will be this vessel that will travel to Mars and it will be owned by Elon Musk and operated by Elon Musk and NASA and the United States can be a passenger on that rocket if it so chooses.

Speaker 3 And if it chooses not to be a passenger on that rocket, then

Speaker 3 there's this possibility that Musk could independently try to build this colony on Mars absent government support or blessing.

Speaker 2 Aaron Ross Powell, you know, given how uninhabitable Mars is, I mean, how seriously should we take both Musk's ambitions and potentially the U.S. government's ambitions to go there?

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, right now it's not technologically plausible, right, for us to get to Mars. Musk has not built a rocket that is capable of doing it.

Speaker 3 In order for a flight to Mars to happen, we have to wait for the orbits of the planets to align so that it's the shortest distance between the two orbs, because otherwise it becomes implausible.

Speaker 3 It requires too much fuel. It requires, and even then it would take eight months to get from Earth to Mars.
I find the idea of colonization to be wildly implausible. It's not at all attractive to me.

Speaker 3 That said, human beings pursue wildly implausible ends in order to fulfill utopian dreams all the time.

Speaker 3 And so I take seriously this idea that Musk is pursuing it and that he's doing so potentially with robust backing from the United States.

Speaker 2 Franklin Ford, thank you so much for your reporting and thank you for your time.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 2 Franklin Ford is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new story appears in the September issue.
It's called The Man Who Ate NASA.

Speaker 2 Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker commemorates the 50th anniversary of the release of George Clinton's album, Mothership Connection. This is Fresh Air.

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Speaker 2 George Clinton is the leader of two groundbreaking funk bands, Parliament and Funkadelic.

Speaker 2 As the writer, producer, and performer behind numerous hits, Clinton helped define the sound of funk in the 1970s and beyond.

Speaker 2 While he hasn't received as much commercial success as his influences, James Brown and Sly Stone, his impact on music is just as profound.

Speaker 2 Rock critic Ken Tucker is using the 50th anniversary of Clinton's classic album, Mothership Connection, to celebrate this pioneering innovator and the enduring power of his funk.

Speaker 1 Good evening. Do not attempt to adjust your radio.
There is nothing wrong. We have taken control as to bring you this special show.
We will return it to you as soon as you are grooving.

Speaker 1 A welcome to Station W-E-F-U-N-K, better known as We Funk, or deeper still, the Mothership Connection, home of the extraterrestrial brothers, dealers of funky music, and P-Funk, uncut funk, the bomb.

Speaker 5 Coming to you directly from the mothership. Top of the chocolate Milky Way.
500,000 kilowatts of P-Funk power. So kick back, dig, while we do it to you in your eardrums.

Speaker 5 On me, I'm known as Lollipop Man, alias the long-haired sucker. My motto is,

Speaker 1 make mine the P-Funk.

Speaker 1 Motherfunk uncut.

Speaker 6 50 years ago, George Clinton was at an artistic peak. The first of many.

Speaker 6 He was writing so much material that in order to get all the music recorded and heard, he fronted two separate groups, Parliament and Funkadelic.

Speaker 6 By a very rough distinction, Parliament's funk music was more light and catchy, while Funkadelic's was heavier and more given to improvisation.

Speaker 6 In 1975, Parliament released Mothership Connection, a loose concept album about funk musicians as galactic invaders, complete with a spaceship that would land on stage at the start of every concert, disgorging George Clinton dressed in what looked like a spacesuit made out of aluminum foil.

Speaker 1 Well, all right.

Speaker 1 Start y'all, citizens of the universe, recording angels. We have returned to claim the pyramid.

Speaker 1 Partying on the mothership.

Speaker 1 I am the mothership connection.

Speaker 1 Get down in 3D.

Speaker 1 Light year group.

Speaker 1 Well, all right.

Speaker 1 You hear the noise, ain't nobody but me and the boys.

Speaker 1 Get down.

Speaker 1 Hit it, fellas.

Speaker 1 All right, all right, start you out here.

Speaker 1 Put a glide in your stride and a dip in your hip, and come on to the mother ship.

Speaker 1 Boost

Speaker 6 For George Clinton, science fiction was a metaphor for the alienating experience of trying to make it as a black pop star.

Speaker 6 He was at the forefront of what came to be called Afro-futurism, along with black writers such as the critic Greg Tate and the novelists Octavia Butler and Ishmael Reed, whose landmark work Mumbo Jumbo had been published just three years before Mothership Connection.

Speaker 6 On tour, Clinton blended his building and his bands into a sprawling spectacle he referred to as the Harley of Funkadelicment Fang,

Speaker 6 or more simply, the U.S. funk mob.

Speaker 6 You've got a real sample thing going down, get down, there's a hole on a river flowing round.

Speaker 6 That song, Give Up the Funk, Tear the Roof Off the Sucker, was both a concert showstopper and the band's first million-selling single.

Speaker 6 It's a groove, a mood, a rhythm Clinton and his platoon of players, including guitarist Eddie Hazel, bassist Bootsie Collins, and the keyboardist Bernie Worrell, could maintain for long stretches, on record and especially in concert.

Speaker 6 Think the Grateful Dead, but with a far superior sense of rhythm.

Speaker 1 Well, all right. Hey, I was digging on y'all funk for a while.
Sound like it got a three on it, though, to me.

Speaker 1 And I was down south and I heard some funk with some main ingredients like Doobie Brothers, Blue Magic, David Bowie. It was cool.

Speaker 1 But can you imagine Doobie and your funk? Ho, W-E-F-U-N-K.

Speaker 1 We funk.

Speaker 1 Make my funk the P-Funk.

Speaker 1 I want my funk unknown.

Speaker 1 Oh, make my funk.

Speaker 1 I want to get funked up. Him.
I want the ball.

Speaker 1 I want the P-Funk. P-Funk, y'all.
I want my funk set up.

Speaker 1 Make my funk the

Speaker 6 Clinton has always preached a utopian vision of, to quote a funkadelic song title, one nation under a groove.

Speaker 6 From the mid-70s to the mid-80s, he released more than 30 albums on a variety of record labels and under an array of different band names. His influence is is vast.

Speaker 6 Prince idolized Clinton and signed him briefly to his Paisley Park label. Scores of hip-hop artists have sampled his melodic hooks.

Speaker 6 But he couldn't sustain it.

Speaker 6 Clinton's empire crumpled under the weight of poor business deals, the industry racism that kept him off white pop radio during his busiest years, and, most unfortunately, drugs and the wear and tear on a body that non-stop touring will inflict.

Speaker 6 George Clinton is now 84, and he's still performing. Back in 1984, I wrote a piece for The Village Voice in which I described Clinton as the great pop brain of our era.

Speaker 6 And for a brief period, he really was.

Speaker 6 I also lamented the fact that he never achieved the ambition he asserted when I first interviewed him, to be as popular as the Beatles.

Speaker 6 The next time I saw Clinton to speak with him, he quoted John Lennon back to me, saying, the dream dream is over.

Speaker 6 He was smiling when he said it, but I could feel his frustration, his pain, as profoundly as one of the genius funk riffs he's been composing for more than half a century.

Speaker 2 Rock critic Ken Tucker on the 50th anniversary of the release of George Clinton's album, Mothership Connection. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, Peter Geralnik.

Speaker 2 He's the author of the definitive two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. His new book is about Elvis's longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

Speaker 2 Geraldnik says researching the book led to many surprises and made him question the many preconceptions about Parker. It's called The Colonel and the King.
I hope you can join us.

Speaker 2 To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.

Speaker 1 Are you here for Easter Island?

Speaker 1 Come on through the triangle.

Speaker 1 Well, all right, ain't nothing but a party.

Speaker 2 Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.
Our managing producer is Sam Briger.

Speaker 2 Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Crinzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and John Sheehan.

Speaker 2 Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper.
Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shurock directs the show.
With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.

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