but if you are being honest with me, would you accept that nasa s golden era came and went long before even you arrived at the agency? well, indeed. nasa has had, actually, several golden eras and it is a matter of perspective. you know, the programme has not only humans that explore beyond earth s boundaries, but also we have missions that study the universe or move out into the solar system and explore, and we have absolutely exploded in those areas that you may not be aware of. well, i kind of am aware of them because i ve done plenty of research into you, and you ve been intimately involved with research missions to mars, jupiter, some remarkable work has been done. but isn t it true to say that the public imagination is only truly 100% captured when nasa is sending human
you ve had to already, before you left nasa s chief scientistjob, you had to accept that the money wasn t there to deliver on getting this mission up to the moon again by 2023. it slipped to 2024, it may even slip years beyond that. what is going wrong? well, of course, we all went through a pandemic. how can we, as engineers and scientists, work closely together, building instruments and assembling things during a time when, you know, social distancing and all the other problems that we had? so, there has been some effect to what we could get done during the pandemic but we are making steady progress and we re really doing quite well. you know, we are building. with respect, you are not making steady progress. the only progress you are making is constantly putting the deadlines back. when do you think this artemis mission will actually land people on the moon again, because the date keeps slipping.
the way we think, and the way we will work together as a world. right. but we, jim, have been talking about nasa s clarity of purpose and mission going forward. and it s going to get confused, isn t it, when the privateers and these guys are super wealthy and super powerful they start believing that they should have a say in how nasa does things. for example, we ve got jeff bezos, who s taken legal action against nasa because he felt he was frozen out of the of the competition to deliver the landing gear for the artemis moon landings. and elon musk got the go ahead and notjeff bezos and he s going to court. this is going to make nasa s future extraordinarily complicated and difficult. it does, but it s always been that way, which you haven t recognised as every time we put out a request for a proposal,
rock, celestial bodies, beyond our own? isn t that the truth? well, of course, we have that connection with humans and we want to be there, and i think that s what the attraction is. when humans step out on the moon or they float around on the space station, that, of course, is going to garnish the public attention. but, you know, our robotic missions, you know, are very personal to us. we spent a significant amount of our career building them, launching them, landing them or having them rove and we get to know them and their idiosyncrasies really well and we cry when they die. so, in a way, you know, humanity has been exploring the solar system and has been exploring the universe in new and unique ways. if i ask you to sum up what nasa is for in a very
of american sanctions on russia as a result of the invasion of ukraine. the russians have told nasa that future cooperation will not happen as long as those sanctions remain in place. so, you guys right now are in the middle of geopolitics and your relationship with russia, to many americans, looks unacceptable. well, i think what you have to also realise is these astronauts work as a team, and it s an international team. we need a place where we can work together in a peaceful way. we have two russians on the space station right now. you know, there s no move afoot in the nasa position not to continue that relationship because they are members of the crew. they are performing important duties on the space station. they rely on the esa and nasa