Rising to the Moon on Easter
Below is the transcript of an interview I had this morning in the company of Olympia LaPoint with the anchors Bill Spadea & Krysia Lenzo in Wake Up America on Newsmax (accessible in video format here). Bill and Krysia’s questions are marked with WS and KL, while my and Olympia’s answers are marked with AL and OL, respectively.
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The Artemis II crew will fly around the Moon tomorrow. Let’s discuss this with Harvard University professor Dr. Avi Loeb. We’re also joined by former NASA rocket scientist and author of Answers Unleashed, Olympia LaPoint.
WS: Welcome, guys. Great to see you both. Happy Easter!
Professor, let’s start with you. Artemis II is going to fly around the far side of the moon tomorrow. Eventually, President Trump wants NASA to set up a moon base. How would you rate the mission so far, and is a moon base realistic?
AL: Thanks for having me. This mission has been a spectacular success so far and in line with the vision of President Trump of bringing humans back to the moon and, in fact, in a much more prominent way than the Apollo missions did. This opens a new frontier of space exploration where there will be some infrastructure on the Moon. As the Artemis II spacecraft comes closer to the Moon, the Moon gets bigger in its windows, and the crew will get there, as you said, tomorrow. At some time during the day, we will lose contact with the astronauts because they will hide behind the Moon relative to Earth. And they could see the sunset behind the moon as well.
Altogether, this mission is aiming at testing various maneuvers and procedures that will be very helpful when we get to Artemis III and future missions that will bring humans to the Moon by combining an encounter of this type with a lander. And we very much look forward to that.
KL: Olympia, visiting the moon is a long-term goal of President Trump before eventually landing on Mars. That could happen. How impressed are you with the way NASA made this happen so fast?
OL: Thank you all first for being on this show on Easter. I am extremely impressed with the science of this particular trip. People are not aware of the great science innovation that is specifically happening with this Artemis II trip. For example, we are testing RS-25 engines, and these are engines that can burn as hot as the temperature on the surface of the Sun, and have the same pressures as the very bottom of the ocean. So that’s the type of technology we are looking at with the engines. We are also looking at the Orion crew capsule. This crew capsule is being tested right now to ensure that the capsule can transport people safely to the outer edges of deep space where it’s not as easy to come back to Earth. This capsule is also going to be tested when it comes back into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Next, the optical communications are going to be tested and what is truly impressive with this particular launch is the laser communications as well as the 4K communications that are going to define the next trajectory of quantum computing and quantum artificial intelligence communications. What we are also looking at, which is just completely amazing, is life sustaining air systems. For anyone going to that location in space, there are air systems so that people on this particular Orion craft and this Artemis rocket are able to breathe fresh air for long periods of time.
So, when I look at this particular launch, I am impressed with the science that is in this launch, and I’m excited for everyone on board.
WS: Dr. Loeb, let us talk just quickly about the kids today. They all want to be on YouTube, but do you think this mission could inspire a lot of kids to take up the sciences, maybe get into NASA or SpaceX in the future?
AL: I surely hope so. I think it’s about time to give up on the addiction to digital screens.
And personally, I would love to take a one-way ticket to space, go to the Moon if there is infrastructure there. We are entering a new era.
Of course, it’s a new age of artificial intelligence, but it’s also a rejuvenated age of space exploration. And I should mention that it’s also a potentially new age of perhaps discovering alien intelligence. That’s another directive that President Trump gave.
WS: Thank you, Dr. Avi Loeb and Olympia LaPointe. Happy Easter. Appreciate you. Happy Easter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
Professional website:
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Social media:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb
https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb
