Original subtitles

[theme music]

Greetings, Bill Nye here.

Like everyone you've ever met, I am native to the Earth.

We'll represent the Earth with this blue circle.

Another object you're familiar with, the Sun.

Closer to us than the Sun is the Earth's Moon.

The Moon right here, Moon.

Rays of sunlight, they're streaming through the blackness

of space.

And once in a while, the Moon casts a dark shadow

on the Earth.

So if you're in the path of this shadow, you see an eclipse.

An eclipse is something that has engendered curiosity

in personkind throughout history.

Seeing the sky go dark, the crickets chirping in the middle

of the day.

It creates a spectacular phenomenon here on the Earth.

The solar eclipse happening in August 2026,

is going to have a path of totality

that people will travel across the world to be able to catch

a glimpse of.

The fact is that the Moon has a very romantic and seductive

quality when it comes to our lore.

And that's the moon that we get to now go to.

We're going back to the freaking Moon!

The space race, heating up once again.

China launching its latest mission to the Moon.

[rocket roaring]

The Chinese will land their Taikonauts on the Moon.

The question is, do we return first?

It's the US and its billionaires against China.

For better or for worse, the American chance at getting back

to the Moon depends on Elon Musk.

He's an immensely complicated, immensely

accomplished, immensely problematic figure.

And Jeff Bezos is trying to muscle in on that territory.

With Blue Origin or SpaceX, you've placed the entire lunar

return effort on two people.

That's a huge risk.

And it's troubling to a lot of people

that they might increase their power by leveraging space to get

more of what they want on Earth.

My first rocket launch was watching the Curiosity Rover

launch to Mars.

And I was sitting with the entire scientific team who had

worked, in some cases, for decades, planning,

designing, building.

And so you had the collective dreams and efforts and blood

and sweat and tears of hundreds of people, all

depending on that one rocket not blowing up.

Main engine start, 0 and liftoff of the Atlas V with Curiosity.

[cheering on radio]

And then when you see it take off,

it is brighter than you can imagine.

It is louder than you can imagine.

And then the crowd itself reacts, screaming, watching it

going up into space, never to return.

The vision of all of NASA is that rocket launches become

routine, right?

[rocket roaring]

SpaceX has revolutionized the launch industry.

And liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket.

Go SpaceX.

Go NASA crew 10.

These days, SpaceX launches at least a couple of times a week.

About 90% of the US space program

is being carried by SpaceX.

They really have far exceeded anyone's expectations.

Holy [bleep] You did it.

[cheers, applause]

Oh, my god.

Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 and it was very much a

passion project.

He'd been a young kid reading Hitchhiker's Guide

to the Galaxy, and he just dreamed of getting our country

back into space and going to Mars.

I've always been interested in space,

but I didn't think that there was anything that I could do

as a single individual.

I thought space was really the arena of government.

He's driving back from Long Island with some friends,

and they were trying to figure out how is NASA going to get us

to Mars.

Sort of started looking into it.

And I went to NASA website to find out when we're going

to Mars, because it seems like, obviously, that is

the next thing after the Moon.

And I couldn't find anything.

So I was like, wow, this seems very strange.

And so he says, I'm going to start a company.

All of his friends think he's nuts.

And so they made a highlights reel of rockets blowing up--

[explosion]

--hoping that would talk him out of it.

And he said, no, man, that just strengthened my resolve.

Elon Musk very much saw himself as someone that could invest

his own money into reinvigorating these very bold,

outlandish ambitions.

He's very entrepreneurial.

He did a Yellow Pages company, putting the Yellow Pages online.

And then he moved into a payments company called x.com.

Big X.

Exactly, x.com.

I think x.com could absolutely be a multibillion

dollar bonanza.

It had a big rival and they end up merging, calling it PayPal.

When I met Elon Musk years ago, he was introduced as Elon Musk,

founder of PayPal.

And as I like to joke, it was as though it was all one word, Elon

Musk, founder of PayPal, I'd like you to meet Bill.

Hi, Elon Musk, founder of PayPal.

Now, he gets eased out because he's a difficult person to work

with, but he takes the buyout from PayPal.

So he does SpaceX and then Tesla,

and then he keeps inventing new things.

It wasn't as though I thought of what are all the businesses

that one could do, and then which is going to be the easiest

one to make the most amount of money?

It wasn't anything like that.

It was really from the standpoint of, what are the most

important problems in the world that need to get solved?

And let me try to help solve those.

I remember him talking about rockets early

and he was compelling.

His vision was compelling.

The goal of SpaceX is to revolutionize space

transportation by dramatically improving the cost

and the reliability, and by building rockets that are

large enough and capable enough to go to other planets,

really, Mars in particular.

So basically, the rockets we use to send astronauts to the Moon,

that was a disposable rocket.

The entire concept of SpaceX was develop a rocket that doesn't

just fly once, it can fly multiple times.

[tools whirring]

[upbeat rock music]

They start building hardware right away, making mistakes,

blowing things up.

[explosion]

It's this interesting transference of Silicon

Valley, right?

It's called you fail fast.

And in a way, that could only happen because it wasn't

a government agency.

NASA blows up one rocket, it's in the news for a month.

Look at the failure of NASA.

Elon blows up a rocket and people are like, look at him,

he's really pushing the discovery of space exploration.

You'd watch Musk walk around and he'd get really angry, even late

at night, if there weren't enough people building something

or getting the launch pad ready.

And you'd say, why are you doing this?

The real motivation, my real motivation, the motivation

people at SpaceX and the reason they work so, so hard

is because we want to see an exciting future in

space exploration.

If we're not on a path to get there, we'll never get there.

Musk was forthright back in the early days of SpaceX

about how uncertain he was that SpaceX would ever

be a profitable or sustainable business at all.

But after some trial and error, they did figure it out.

SpaceX in 2015 caught a booster for the first time,

refurbished it, flew it again.

[cheers, applause]

And this marked the time at which SpaceX really morphed

from this underdog into a dominant space power.

[upbeat rock music]

Elon pretty much self-funded SpaceX in the beginning,

but along the way, he found things that would be very

commercially successful, most notably putting satellites

into low Earth orbit.

When he started talking about that at the time,

I thought it was brilliant.

I continue to think it's brilliant.

[rocket roaring]

A giant leap for SpaceX, the company launching a rocket

full of 60 satellites overnight.

Starlink is SpaceX's biggest moneymaker.

It's a large constellation of satellites that basically

reflect and provide internet access across the world

to anybody, anywhere.

They've launched over 10,000 satellites.

It's more than any other company in the world.

It's more than any other country in the world.

Musk controls a great deal of access to space.

And so the more reliant we get on SpaceX, one future could be,

the more reliant we are on Musk.

NASA has chosen SpaceX to return us to the Moon.

We are in a great competition with a rival that has the will

and the means to challenge American exceptionalism

across multiple domains, including in the high ground

of space.

The Trump administration has made it absolutely clear

that its top priority in space now is to beat China back

to the Moon.

China is saying it wants to get to the Moon by 2030.

So every step has to fall exactly right into place

if the United States is going to get there before.

SpaceX is using its massive, gargantuan Starship rocket

for this purpose.

I mean, Starship is just big.

It's really, really big.

It's almost like going back to Bugs Bunny cartoons from

the 1940s and how they represent spaceships--

[whooshing, dramatic music]

--is kind of what Starship is like.

[intriguing music]

SpaceX wants this rocket to work not just to get astronauts

to the Moon, but also to get to Mars.

And so far, they've done test flights with varying degrees

of success.

[rocket roaring]

It is hard to describe how much of a step

Starship would be if it succeeds.

And that's the operative word is "if."

Late 2025, there started to be rumblings in NASA

that, oh, my god, if we continue to depend on Musk,

we're going to lose the space race.

And it was the ex-acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy

last year, who said that if SpaceX doesn't have Starship,

its lunar lander, ready for our use, then we'll use Blue Origin.

And it was a very overt way of saying, if SpaceX doesn't focus,

we'll go with the competitor, and really teeing up

this billionaire space race.

[rocket rumbling]

[intriguing music]

It's kind of underappreciated that Blue Origin was founded

a couple of years before SpaceX.

Bezos started the company in 2000 when he became

a billionaire with Amazon.

He had the funds to pour money into starting to make space

exploration technology that was cheaper than we had seen it.

And the company really operated in stealth mode for a long time,

and that was by design.

They famously have a tortoise as a mascot, and they have a Latin

motto, "Gradatim Ferociter," which means "Step by

Step, Ferociously."

SpaceX has always been, you fail fast.

Blue Origin, which is infinitely well capitalized by Jeff Bezos'

Amazon money, has only launched two of its larger rockets

into space.

[triumphant music]

Bezos has said for a long time that the tortoise beats the hare

and that he's going to go slow and steady and careful,

but in the end, he's going to win this kind of like battle

of the billionaires.

Welcome back to Earth, First Step.

Congratulations to all of you.

Their first major project was building the new Shepard rocket,

which is very different than the Falcon rockets

that SpaceX flies because it's suborbital.

Suborbital rockets require far less power,

and they just go up and down.

You might remember that he sent up a rocket that brought

his then girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez and Katy Perry

up in the near orbit.

[laughs]

I think a lot of people thought it was kind of a cheap

publicity stunt.

Is it a PR stunt?

Who cares?

It brings attention to space travel.

At the end of the day, I think their ambitions are much bigger

than tourism.

If we move out into the solar system,

for all practical purposes, we have unlimited resources.

One of the things that Musk and Bezos have in common is as kids,

they loved science fiction.

Some town resident had donated his entire science fiction

collection to the Cotulla Public Library.

Just teensy, probably half the library was these science

fiction books.

And I read, over several Summers,

I read through that collection of science fiction,

and that added to my interest in space travel and science

and the future.

Jeff Bezos loves to talk about how when he was at Princeton,

he met Gerard O'Neill, who is a very famous astrophysicist who

conceptualized this idea of O'Neill Colonies, which are

these giant orbiting laboratories that spin to

create gravity.

These are very large structures, miles on end,

and they hold a million people or more each.

We get to preserve this unique gem of a planet which

is completely irreplaceable.

There is no plan B. We have to save this planet.

He said explicitly his goal is to save planet Earth by moving

industry off the planet into space.

We were given a gift, this nearby body called the Moon.

[cheers, applause]

This is Blue Moon.

We've been working on this lander for three years.

Jeff Bezos has definitely talked about becoming the Amazon

of space.

How he is building the transportation

services so that hundreds of other space companies

can start doing economic activity in space.

In 1994, I started Amazon.

All of the heavy-lifting infrastructure needed for Amazon

to exist was already in place.

We did not have to build a transportation system to

deliver packages.

It was there.

Infrastructure lets entrepreneurs do amazing things.

So the kids here and your children

and their grandchildren, they're going to build those

O'Neill colonies.

This generation's job, my generation's job,

is to build the infrastructure so that you'll be able to.

Jeff Bezos is a really great entrepreneur,

there's no question.

What he did at Amazon was astonishing, and a lot of people

didn't think he could pull it off.

He would not allow the company to make money.

He was like, no, we're not done.

Scale is what it's about now.

So we're actually going to own the pipes of the internet

and be the arbiter of who can sell on the internet.

I mean, it's evil, but it's genius.

[chuckles]

[soft dramatic music]

I'm taking my Amazon lottery winnings,

and I'm converting them into reusable rocket vehicles

so that we can lower the cost of access to space.

There's an enthusiasm to him, an enthusiasm that pushes things

like crazy.

He's a visionary.

This vision sounds very big, and it is.

None of this is easy.

All of it is hard.

We choose to go to the Moon.

[applause]

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade

and do the other things, not because they are easy,

but because they are hard.

[rocket roaring]

The space race with US and the Soviet Union in the past

was really all about proving that our system of government

and our system of economics could beat the Soviet model.

If we could beat them to the Moon,

then it was a demonstration that our entire system was better

than the Soviet system.

[rocket rumbling]

On October 4, 1957, a world-stirring event took place.

Sputnik was the first spacecraft that orbited the Earth.

It was launched by the Soviet Union.

Now, imagine if we were living back at a time

where nothing had ever orbited the Earth before, and suddenly

those Communists over there in Russia with nuclear bombs

that they want to rain down on us,

they are flying over our country in space.

The ultimate high ground.

If you could have weapons in space,

man, you'd really be in charge.

With two Sputniks orbiting the Earth simultaneously,

the whole world began to speak about the triumph

of Soviet science.

The Soviet Union also launched the first human in space,

Yuri Gagarin.

The space pilot whom the Russians have deified as the man

of the century, arrives at the airport outside of Moscow

for his first public appearance.

And so that created this crash program

to catch up to the Soviet Union and to beat them.

[dramatic music]

I certainly remember watching Apollo 11.

So I was on my knees, black and white television.

OK, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now.

One in every five people was watching this thing.

That's one small step for man--

And we see that humans have finally escaped this gravity.

--one giant leap for mankind.

And it changed my life.

I became a mechanical engineer.

I became an aerospace engineer because of Apollo.

Come on, man.

Hugely affected by it, hugely.

I think it sent a message to the world what the United States was

capable of doing.

If you can set out and achieve the near-impossible,

send astronauts to the Moon and bring them back home safely,

I wonder what else the nation is capable of doing?

And maybe I'll think twice as an adversary

before I encroach or do something that

could be perceived as hostile.

In a sense, that was the pinnacle of American power.

[soft dramatic music]

Every mission subsequently from that

started to gain confidence and ambition.

But by the time that Apollo 15 launched,

the program had functionally ended.

It became clear the Soviet Union was kind of going out

of business.

There was this feeling that, OK, we've had our fun

and we don't have the wherewithal, resources, or money

to do this anymore.

That was a correct read of public opinion.

It no longer seemed that urgent to keep going back to the Moon.

[tense music]

[the prisoners, "going back"]

During the 1970s, during the Apollo program, Richard Nixon

made the decision to cancel the rest of the program

because there was political backlash.

People didn't see the value of it.

You also have to look at the cultural background of what was

happening in America at this time.

The Vietnam War was becoming an increasingly big part

of the American psyche.

Free our brothers!

And there were more protests and demonstrations

that made space exploration, by comparison,

seem sort of frivolous.

Your marginal cost of an Apollo mission was not cheap.

And so people wondered why were we spending so much money

on this when we've got poverty, we've got riots in the US,

we've got energy problems with the Middle East.

In that environment, they made the political decision to

cancel it.

After retiring the Apollo program,

NASA understood the cost problem.

Every Apollo rocket had to be thrown away.

That's why it went into developing a different type

of vehicle.

[upbeat rock music]

If you can reuse it, we'll start bringing down the cost,

and then NASA can go achieve all those exploration and science

dreams without needing to pull too much out of public coffers.

NASA has been extra cautious in making sure the first launch is

textbook perfect.

So we moved on into the space shuttle era.

There's a lot on the line.

Nixon himself decided to go with the Space Shuttle Program

in order to win votes in Southern California.

Unfortunately, the space shuttle never really became exactly what

NASA envisioned.

The goal was to launch the space shuttle dozens of times a year,

but the most NASA ever achieved was roughly, I think,

eight or nine launches in a single year.

And then Challenger happened.

Major catastrophe in America's space program.

Challenger, only seconds after leaving the launch pad,

according to NASA, has exploded in mid-air.

We do not have any more information

than is being provided to the public at this time.

And then the Columbia disaster in 2003.

You are looking at what is the final moments of the Space

Shuttle Columbia.

The two shuttle disasters in total

killed 14 different astronauts.

The tragedies were becoming so politically unpopular.

So the Shuttle Program was starting to wind down.

But this was a problem because the shuttle was the only vehicle

that the United States had that was capable of taking astronauts

to and from the International Space Station.

When the space shuttle was ending,

the Obama White House proposed a dramatic reconfiguration of NASA

to rely on commercial providers to send individuals to the

Space Station.

In order to reach the Space Station,

we will work with a growing array of private companies

competing to make getting to space easier and

more affordable.

[applause]

This goes back to the original conceptions of space.

You think about 2001--

A Space Odyssey, it's Pan Am as running the flights up

to their space station in that movie,

like a commercial aviation company at the time.

[JOHANN STRAUSS II, "THE BLUE DANUBE WALTZ"]

So the Obama administration put a lot of political capital

to championing this commercial capability, which primarily was

a SpaceX capability at the time.

[upbeat funk music]

What I think we're beginning to see

is the dawn of a new era of space exploration,

but one that is driven by commercial companies as much,

if not more, than by government.

NASA awarded SpaceX a contract for, I think it was about

$1.6 billion.

NASA has awarded us the contract to provide the majority

of the cargo to the Space Station,

and to return cargo to Earth.

The thing we're really hoping will occur this year is

that NASA will ask us to do astronaut transport as well.

Back in 2010, Elon Musk was giving President Obama a tour

of his facilities and showing him the progress

that SpaceX was making at the time.

This is the most advanced rocket in the world.

And this was a demonstration that the Obama administration

was putting a lot of political effort

to supporting a commercial approach.

NASA has always relied on commercial companies, always.

But what is different is civil servants

used to design the rocket.

Now that's being designed by civilians

working for corporations, not working for the government.

The way that NASA works with SpaceX and Blue Origin

is that NASA relies on them to basically do most of it.

And then if it doesn't happen, NASA is not

on the hook to pay extra.

But at the same time, they don't have the ability to really get

down into the weeds and understand what's going on.

There is definitely going to be a new industry.

It's going to be stronger.

It's going to be more powerful, more capable,

and it's going to ensure that we take things to a whole new level

in terms of spaceflight.

[tense music]

Then in 2017, Trump signed the Space Policy Directive 1.

[applause]

The directive I'm signing today will refocus America's space

program on human exploration and discovery.

[dramatic music]

President Trump created the Artemis Program.

He made it clear that we are returning to the Moon

to stay, to build a base.

And you want to be able to keep astronauts alive,

potentially six months at a time.

So as a result, we need affordability.

And liftoff.

Right now, you have two companies, SpaceX and Blue

Origin, that are working on vehicles that

will be able to bring our astronauts to the surface

of the Moon.

And thus begins a very long battle between Elon Musk's

SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin,

to be the first company to produce that lunar lander

that NASA is asking for.

And liftoff of Artemis I.

The Artemis program right now kind of envisions a series

of test flights.

Artemis I was a test flight with no astronauts on it.

Artemis II was four crew going around the Moon.

Artemis III will be a demonstration mission in Earth

orbit to show that their crew capsule can dock with one

of these commercially provided lunar landers.

Artemis IV is scheduled to be the first lunar landing,

sometime before 2030.

Artemis V starts to frankly, get a little hazy after that.

The goal now is to build out a permanent lunar base.

Why do you want to have people on the Moon?

The Moon is a great place for resources,

and so if you want to build big structures in space,

you want to go get materials from the Moon.

What resources would be on the Moon?

There's a couple of things that are fascinating.

We know with absolute certainty that there's water on the Moon.

Water on the Moon is fuel, like oil on Earth.

So now China, private corporations, the US, all trying

to get to the Moon to get to that water.

Because if you separate the H2O, now you have hydrogen

and oxygen. You can bring them back together.

It creates [puffs air] boom, out into space.

You do that from the Moon, you save a lot of money.

Another one that's talked about is going to be AI.

Within a few years, data centers are going to start appearing

in space.

The value of having a data center in space

as opposed to the Earth, is that you have ready access to energy

through the Sun.

People don't like living next to data centers

and so well, if you put them in the space,

all that stuff goes away.

This is about establishing an outpost on the Moon

for scientific operations.

And then obviously there is just a lot of inspiration that's

going to come out of having humankind's first outpost

on another world.

I have no doubt we're going to launch Artemis III in 2027.

So SpaceX and Blue Origin are both racing to bring their lunar

landers to fruition, and both are in very different stages.

Blue Origin had this spectacular failure recently.

The moment a Blue Origin rocket exploded overnight.

And SpaceX, which has had a couple issues.

What in the heck?

And of course, the head of SpaceX is a controversial guy.

Now we see space moving from a collective effort

into an individualized capability that is represented

by a person.

NASA is running a risk of not owning the hardware that's

required for it to succeed, but also the reputation itself,

to a large part, is defined by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

NASA is saving some money, but it's introducing a host

of other risks that they've never had to deal with before.

[dramatic music]

[rocket roars]

Right now, most space activity is being conducted by a few very

wealthy companies and wealthy individuals.

Elon!

Elon, right here!

Jeff!

Jeff!

On the left!

Jeff!

And I think that space industry is going to create more

concentration of wealth than anything the world has

seen before.

One of the most highly anticipated IPOs in years, Elon

Musk, rang the opening bell in celebration of its IPO

on NASDAQ.

We've got these billionaires playing larger and larger roles

in our lives.

We have never seen a company firing on all 12,000 cylinders

like we're seeing Amazon.

They control what we see, what we read.

Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of amazon.com,

is buying The Washington Post.

They have ownership over seemingly everything.

And it can make us numb.

But this is next Level, like literally in orbit and in space.

Today, Elon Musk broke history, becoming the world's

first trillionaire.

He's not motivated by money, but I

think he's motivated by becoming the world's first trillionaire.

He almost feels like he's an avatar in his own video game,

and he's racking up the points.

And let me tell you, if people had told me

this was going to happen, I was like,

man, you must be smoking some really good crack.

[laughter]

Because I think this company's going to fail.

He's powerful in a negative way, I would say.

He's imperious.

I don't know if Elon Musk has become what he's become

or if he was always what he is

[tense electronic music]

I think we all have drives.

For Elon, his drives are partly shaped by his demons,

those dark fears he had as a lonely child.

When he was a kid, Elon was incredibly socially awkward.

He had no friends.

And he got beaten up, bullied.

He's been able to harness that.

And that leads to these drives where he has to prove himself.

Elon changed over time, but he is a variable person.

Sometimes he's in engineering mode.

Other times he's dark, in what one of his girlfriends

calls demon mode.

And it meant his face would take on a blank stare

and he would just get angry and start telling people

that they were messing things up.

I think Elon Musk's perception of the world

has been drastically morphed over the years.

Well, the debate over when business can reopen

is heating up between California and Tesla.

The COVID regulations shut down his plants,

and he felt that politicians didn't understand the nature

of risk-taking and building things.

And so he goes further and further down what

I call a rabbit hole.

The expansion of the shelter-in-place or, frankly, I

would call it forcibly imprisoning people

in their homes against all their constitutional rights,

in my opinion, and breaking people's freedoms in ways

that are horrible and wrong and not why people came to America

or built this country.

What the [bleep].

Excuse me.

He has a deep paranoia about politics

and worried that the woke mind virus was destroying

civilization, and he felt only by doing things like buying

Twitter and blowing up the polite political correctness,

could he be successful.

Elon Musk now owns one of the world's most influential

social media platforms.

The world's richest man is going to effectively control one

of the most influential platforms.

He said all kinds of crazy things.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has apologized to a Thai cave

rescuer for calling him a pedo or pedophile

in an unfounded claim.

He's made all kinds of crazy accusations

that he's later had to walk back.

Now he's this awful creature who espouses white supremacist

feelings or at least promotes them.

People say that you're a racist.

There's all kinds of things said about you,

which I'm sure you would disagree with.

But I just don't understand, what is the motivation for

doing that?

Are you fomenting this?

My partner, she's half Indian, my wife,

and I have four children with her.

One of them was named after a famous Indian physicist.

So I would say I'm not racist.

And also, if you look at the people that are employed

at my companies, we have senior executives of all races.

Whether he's doing it to stir the pot

or because he actually believes it, who knows?

It doesn't even matter.

I'm not just MAGA, I'm dark, gothic MAGA.

Elon Musk made a late-life conversion to a MAGA version

of republicanism, became a key Trump ally, donated hundreds

of millions of dollars to his campaign.

And then Trump installed Musk as the head of this Department

of Governmental Efficiency.

I have created the brand new Department of

Government Efficiency.

[cheers, applause]

Does anybody remember DOGE?

Did DOGE ever save us a dime?

The chainsaw for bureaucracy.

Did he have to run around with a chainsaw?

Did he have to stand in the Oval office with his kid?

No.

To be as effective?

No, but he desperately needs attention, so.

Yes!

It's been unfair because DOGE became the whipping boy

for everything.

So if there was some cut, real or imagined,

everyone would blame DOGE.

[cannon fires]

When the war in Ukraine began, Elon Musk's superhero instincts

kicked in.

He wanted to put on the cape, and he did help

Ukraine enormously.

At a certain point, as the war's been going on for a while,

Ukraine wanted to do a sneak attack on Crimea.

And they wanted to use Starlink to guide that.

Now, Musk became rightly worried that, OK, this now could lead

to a nuclear war.

And the question was, was he going

to allow it to work in Crimea?

And he decided no, which ends up thwarting

this secret sneak attack.

He says he received an emergency request from Ukraine's leaders

to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol.

If I had agreed to their request,

then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war

and conflict escalation.

One of the dangers of someone grabbing a kind

of pseudo-monopoly over satellite internet communication

is it gives that person a lot of geopolitical power.

We forget that by handing over that control

to a single individual and granting them, in a sense, kind

of godlike powers, you are giving away a lot.

I'm not sure that it's a great idea for a Mercurial man

with very particular interests to have that power.

[soft dramatic music]

SpaceX has done amazing things that further enable

NASA's mission.

Elon is one person within that, but there is no doubt he has

the vision, and he has the engineering

and entrepreneurial chops to take the vision

and bring it to reality.

[upbeat dance music]

But I think it's interesting that we try to understand

these people, for good and for bad, who are moving us

into a new era of technology.

We no longer worship, I would say,

at the altar of kindness and character,

but of billionaire innovators.

They're the new protected class.

I think Musk and Bezos are similar in that they

both disrupted big, important industries

and done it through force of will

and through thinking out of the box.

But they've also done it sometimes by running roughshod.

Amazon firing back against a damning account of what it's

like to work for the world's largest retailer.

Our CNN Money Team sums up Amazon's corporate culture

as "five big no's."

There was a lot of very good reporting on the way

workers were treated.

Jeff Bezos responded to his more than 100,000 employees, writing,

"I don't recognize this Amazon," adding "Amazon would not

tolerate callous workplace behavior."

It's striking how much politics can play a part in this.

Jeff Bezos coming under harsh criticism for his management,

or you might say, mismanagement of The Washington Post.

When he's trying to compete for these big new rocket contracts,

he's really taken The Post in another direction.

Journalists at The Post are questioning his motives,

wondering if he's trying to curry favor with

President Trump.

These days, there's two groups of people that get to access

space, right?

There's the billionaire class.

In fact, the current administrator of NASA,

Jared Isaacman, is somebody who paid hundreds of millions

of dollars to do a private space mission.

And then there are the astronauts, the people that are

supposed to be representative of a country or of all people.

And the dichotomy between these people

that have worked their ass off for decades to get to this point

and then these folks who can buy their way,

I think it's really striking.

I know people can be dismissive of people like Bezos and Musk

making space into a billionaire boy's hobby.

But we have to remember that if you didn't have SpaceX

and you didn't have the other private companies,

we'd still be grounded.

We live in divided times.

And if it's convenient to beat up the billionaires,

then so be it.

I would just say the reason why NASA's budget is 1/4%

of the discretionary budget is because you have some

of the wealthiest individuals in the world that are not choosing

to put their resources into sports teams,

but instead putting it into the capabilities that not only

benefit your nation, but honestly, all of humankind.

So the question is, would you feel better if you paid a lot

more out of your paycheck every week for NASA's capabilities?

Or are you happy that somebody else is chipping in?

OK, I'm ready.

OK, go ahead.

[dramatic music]

It's been more than 50 years since anyone walked on the Moon.

Whenever there's an actual return to the Moon

and it's in 4K, not in grainy black and white,

I think it's going to be a huge moment for the planet, huge.

From my perspective, we return to the Moon

first and foremost, because we have been gifted a proving

ground four days away for eventually going to Mars, which

is the next step on the grand journey.

It is our destiny in the long term

to venture out among the stars, I think,

for the good of humankind.

[dramatic music]

Houston, you're looking good.

Musk always talks about needing to make humans

an interplanetary species because if something happens

to Earth, it'll guarantee the survival of humans.

And Bezos has also talked about taking that next step

into people living in the cosmos.

So for them, really, the expenditure on spaceflight

is very much tied into their vision of what philanthropy is.

There may have been two different visions,

but in some ways, Musk and Bezos are

doing a lot of the same things, creating a new space economy.

Billionaires are motivated by nothing but money.

Listen, I don't like billionaires.

I think it's a terrible, awful concept.

But I think the byproduct of the exploration

that these billionaires are conducting

will be we all benefit.

Someday we'll all be going to space.

We'll all take rides up there.

There's going to be a lot of space tourism.

I think there will be hotels in orbit.

There will be people playing golf on the Moon.

There's going to be a lot of adventure

and a lot of spectacular vacations in space.

I believe we're going to have large space colonies, colonies

on Mars.

All of these things are going to take

tremendous industrial development in space,

but we're expecting that to happen

over the next several decades.

What do you think of this right here?

It's kind of translucent.

Yeah, it's translucent.

The original space program brought all kinds of really

cool developments.

Your cell phone, this stupid device that we're all stuck to,

the camera inside your cell phone, the cameras that are

filming me right now.

What's up?

I mean, navigation around the world, from your cars

to your airplanes.

We all rely on space assets.

But the really astonishing discoveries are yet to be made

on planets beyond the Moon.

We know so little about our solar system, let alone the two

trillion other galaxies.

We have to keep going.

We can't slow down.

We as a species, as far as space is concerned,

we're just still warming up.

We have not even begun.

We're going to be out there among the stars, making science

fiction no longer fiction.

[applause]

You got to get up close to the eyepiece of the telescope.

Space is inspiring.

[indistinct chatter]

And I think that the reason it's so inspiring,

it gets back to humans looking up at the sky

and seeing the eclipses.

It's the wonder of that open-ended cosmos.

I do think everyone should go to space, because I think everyone

needs a cosmic perspective, and that's the easiest way to get

one without any explanation.

You see it and you're like, [gasps]

damn, look how small and fragile it is.

And that's where we all live.

And all the borders and everything disappears.

And there is no race and there is no nothing.

It's just one little spaceship hurtling through space

at an incredible speed.

4, 3, 2, 1!

Seeing my first rocket launch, that

wasn't a rational experience.

That was an experience almost akin to a religious experience.

The confrontation with the infinite, to your own ego,

and watching yourself disappear against that.

It's a rare thing that something so exciting and scientifically

relevant and geopolitically relevant

also gets to provide us a neutral way to access something

very profound.

We humble ourselves before the cosmos.

We are lucky to be able to witness it.