Is this true? This is

absolutely true.

It goes back even before that.

Really, I have been interested in space my entire life.

I can't remember not being.

And it was the stars and the moon that were really the first things that...

I found fascinating, looking up at the night sky, watching shooting stars.

anywhere?

[news music] Still to come in this podcast, what time is it on the moon? And why that question needs to be answered sooner rather than later.

Time is really critical for a spacecraft.

If you get it wrong, you might fire your rocket engines at just the wrong time, your navigation errors could go huge, and it could have catastrophic consequences.

So how can it be done? Libby Jackson is the head of space at Britain's Science Museum.

Thanks to Albert Einstein, we understand space and time and relativity, and time on the Moon runs ever so slightly faster than time on Earth because the Moon is smaller than the Earth.

And we are entering an era of lots and lots of, uh, spacecraft are heading to the Moon for missions.

Space agencies around the world are looking to explore the South Pole of the Moon, and they want to work together.

And in order to do that, they have to agree on what time it is, because time is really critical for a spacecraft.

So what exactly has happened here?

So the fairing, the, the top stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that took the Blue Ghost lander to the Moon, uh, and it launched about a year and a half ago, um, was on its...

Uh, it, it took the, it took the lander to the Moon, um, and then this top stage was, uh, left in a, in a trajectory and a path that was thought to just, uh, keep being in space.

But it's quite hard to predict when you have three bodies, when you have the Moon, the Earth, the Sun, and this, this rocket body, quite which path it will take.

And it's found itself on a collision course with the Moon.

Uh, and this morning, um, it's crashed into the Moon at quite small speeds.

And astronomers have been quite excited because they're hoping that perhaps they will get to see, uh, some of the ejecta crater.

And what exactly went wrong? How did the bit of this SpaceX rocket end up crashing in the first place?

The fact remains, though, that we haven't wanted to put people there for fifty years, and that therefore something else has changed in the kind of mindset, Libby.

Yeah.

Well, the last fifty years, we have figured out how to live and work in space.

Apollo was a sprint.

It was an amazing, very expensive accomplishment that happened back in the sixties and seventies.

And as Julia said, once that finish line was made, once the US had proven to the world that they were better than the Soviet Union, they went, "We don't need to spend that money." And actually, horizons narrowed to the science that we could do, to the benefits that we could draw from living and working in low Earth orbit.

We've had humans on the International Space Station continuously since two thousand.

What about, Libby, what about commercial space stations?

I mean, look, listening to it, it gives you goosebumps, but how are we, how are we to view this mission? Is this a, simply a test bed for getting to the moon later on? Does it have validity in itself? Does it have a scientific purpose, or is it engineering?

It, it, it's both.

This, this is first and foremost a test flight, the first time that humans have been in this Orion spacecraft, the first time they've been on top of the rocket, and it is about laying the groundwork and checking out that we know what we're doing so that future Artemis missions can move us towards landing on the Moon.

Artemis III will test out the landers, and NASA are hoping to get humans to the Moon on Artemis IV, to land on the Moon.

But there have been scientific observations pouring back, uh, studying the surface of the Moon, taking images.

Seeing things with human eyes is different to seeing things with, with scientific instruments.

You-Can't see things perhaps in so much detail, but you see things differently with s-perspective, and they've really worked hard to practice the communication.

Uh, what's still got to happen, and what might still be tricky?

could or decided to, what would you have to do? You know, within 10 years, what would have to be in place so that people could live in a city on the lunar surface?

The moon is a pretty hostile place to live.

A day on the moon lasts for the same in total as a whole day.

two weeks here on Earth.

So there's two weeks, two Earth weeks of sunlight and two Earth weeks of darkness.

There's no atmosphere.

There's no protection from the radiation that the sun spews out.

Is this the start of a lunar economy?