Dr Jacob Bleacher: Why do we need to go back to the Moon?

In 1969, Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people ever to walk on the Moon, a feat over the next three and a half years only 10 other space explorers would go on to achieve.

Now it has taken nearly 50 years, but NASA once again has ambitions to land the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024.

The Artemis Program is a wide-reaching effort by numerous space agencies and led by NASA, with ambitions to not only put human feet on the lunar surface but to build a permanent base there, with a lunar space station in orbit around the Moon.

To find out more, this week we speak to Dr Jacob Bleacher, Chief Exploration Scientist for human exploration at NASA, about how we are going to get there, what effect deep space will have on the astronauts, and why now is the time to go back to the Moon.

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Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast:

Elisa Raffaella Ferrè: What happens to the brain in space?Everything You Wanted To Know About… Physics with Jim Al-KhaliliDr Erin Macdonald: Is there science in Star Trek?Kevin Fong: What happened to Apollo 13?

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