Why Artemis is inspiring – despite Trump

The noble lie behind NASA is a lie, but it is also noble

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, I talk about Tory plans for a ‘National Pothole Patrol’ and how AI can be used to spot potholes and Martin tells the story of a big NIMBY campaign to save a car park. Plus we speak to Asif Ghafoor, CEO of EV charger company BE.EV, who explains to us why building out the public charger network can be a nightmare. Listen here!

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The contrast over the last ten days has been almost too much to bear.

On the one hand, we watched as NASA’s Artemis II astronauts travelled further from the Earth than anyone ever has before. It was an incredible feat of science and engineering. A tangible manifestation of what humans can achieve when they work together.

But at the same time we witnessed the worst person on the planet threatening to wipe out Iranian civilisation in its entirety. Whether the ceasefire has held or not by the time you’re reading this, it was another grim milestone in the unravelling of the post-1945 world order.

Given the latter, along with everything else Trump has done, some people had a very understandable reaction. They were keen to make it clear that they did not feel the same sense of excitement and wonder about this latest moonshot, as we associate with the Apollo missions of the 1960s.

And it wasn’t just the people you might expect saying this.

In fact, despondency was the response of a couple of Britain’s highest profile science communicators – the sorts of people you might expect to be particularly excited by the Artemis programme.