>> Power on the moon has always been one of the biggest obstacles.

The second is, is it a place where people can actually live a full life cycle or is it a place that we can only have adult humans visit?

That's going to really determine the future of humanity on the moon.

Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer.

Today we are blasting off into the great beyond to look at the 21st century space race.

Earlier this year, NASA's Artemis II mission sent four astronauts on a historic flyby around the moon, the first crewed return to lunar space in more than 50 years.

Interest in putting humans back on the moon is surging.

Both China and the United States have plans to send astronauts to the surface in the next few years.

Private companies are racing to build faster, cheaper rockets that will carry equipment and satellites and people to the moon and beyond.

All of a sudden, landing on the moon doesn't feel like a relic of the Cold War space race.

It's the next strategic step with the potential to unlock resources and create new industries and bolster military capabilities beyond the Earth.

The question isn't only can we get back?

We hope so.

It's also what happens after we do.

Who sets the rules?

And how can we avoid conflict in a place that no one officially owns, but everyone sees an opportunity in?

Joining me to discuss all this and more, Canadian astronaut and best-selling author of multiple space thrillers, Chris Hadfield.

Don't worry, I've also got your puppet regime.

Greetings, alien life forms.

Wait a minute, I thought you're the aliens.

Right, but from our perspective, you're the aliens.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

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And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is investing in the future, working to create an impact in advanced recycling and in emerging technology companies that will help shape tomorrow.

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Additional funding provided by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And In 1967, American hotel magnate Baron Hilton stood before a room of astronomers and space enthusiasts and pitched his vision for the first hotel on the moon.

The Lunar Hilton was conceived as a three level 100 room complex and was complete with a galaxy lounge where guests could sip reconstituted martinis and they could order freeze dried steaks.

But despite Hilton's retro futuristic optimism, the idea never got past concept sketches and promotional items like mock room keys and lunar reservation cards.

Nearly 60 years later, the dream for humans to return to the moon and stay there is back.

Booster ignition and lift off.

Pretty good roll pitch.

This spring, NASA's Artemis II mission sent four astronauts around the far side of the moon was the farthest that humans have ever traveled from the Earth, and a technical feat that laid the groundwork for sending astronauts back to the lunar surface as soon as 2028.

And that renewed push is the result of a major shift here on Earth.

The space sector is being transformed by the rise of private companies.

The commercial side of space now makes up 78% of the global space economy.

That's a competition that is drastically bringing down the cost of launching rockets, making future lunar missions much more cost effective.

The moon's real prize may be hidden in the shadows.

Scientists believe that water ice could exist in dark craters near the lunar South Pole, and if enough water exists, it could be converted into hydrogen fuel, making the moon a gas station for deep space.

It's the difference between shipping everything from Earth and getting everything you need from the moon itself.

The US isn't the only one that's eyeing the moon.

China has been investing in its own space program.

For Beijing, a permanent base on the moon means global prestige, military dominance, and explosive growth for its own space industry.

So how do you solve the problem of who's in charge of the moon?

There is a historic precedent for lunar coexistence.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty says that no nation can claim sovereignty over the moon.

But it says very little about what happens when someone builds the first power station or the first fuel depot, the first communications network, or the first permanent settlement.

The United States is now promoting the Artemis Accords, voluntary guidelines on transparency, coordination, safety zones to prevent conflict on the lunar surface.

So far, 70 nations have signed on, but China and Russia have not.

They have a separate vision for the moon's future, the International Lunar Research Station, with its own partners, its own timeline, and its own rules, maybe even its own nuclear power station.

With so much of the world gazing upward, it seems almost certain that humans are going to return to the moon in the near future, whether it's China, the US, Russia, or someone else.

The question is whether it becomes an exciting research lab that propels humanity into the future or the next geopolitical battleground.

Joining me to talk about all these possibilities as well as what it's like to sleep in space.

Someone that knows, Chris Hadfield, Canadian space astronaut and author of the new space thriller, "Final Orbit."

Chris Hadfield, thanks so much for joining us.

My pleasure, Ian.

I've been looking forward to talking to you.

So it's not like we've never talked space before, but still, honest to God astronaut is fun.

And I wanted to start with Artemis II.

And I'm wondering, you know, it's been a long time, I mean, like, you know, sort of me being born before, since we've been on the moon.

And I'm wondering, you know, what's different about the moon mission this time around?

- Two or three big things.

One is the cost of getting there has plummeted.

It took a significant proportion of the gross national product to get Apollo to the moon and back safely without killing everybody.

Our technology has advanced in so many different areas since 1969 through 1972.

So that opening up of a cheaper way to get there, that's one.

Two is we've discovered water on the moon.

And if the moon is a lifeless dry rock, then everything has to come from Earth, and it's less appealing.

But if you go to the poles of the moon, there's always sunlight, almost almost 365 days a year.

And also there are deep reserves of water 100 billion gallons of water, which is our guess, frozen into into the craters in the moon.

So if you've got sun, and you've got water, then you got sunny waterfront.

And that's what we weren't expecting when we went to the moon 50 years ago.

So that's the second piece.

And then I think something that was really evidenced in the Artemis II flight was the advances in our ability to share the experience real time, we have digital cameras in the hands of those astronauts.

So it's not like Mike Collins takes a picture of the moon, you got to wake a month before we're actually going to see his Hasselblad picture, they could have the real time, shared excitement of new discovery right there with everybody and what it's like to be a lunar explorer here at this phase of human history.

And I think that surprised a lot of people, you know, naming a crater on the moon after the commander's wife who'd passed away with cancer, and just the immediate personal nature and reality of what space flight and space exploration is like.

So I think all those things together, there are maybe a natural extension of the Apollo program, but I think they're all different enough now to really set the stage for what's coming.

- Now, I know one of the proximate goals here is establishing long-term outpost, human settlement on the moon, very different than just going there and coming back.

What are the biggest technical obstacles to be able to actually, I mean, we know we can get there, but to actually set up shop, what do we need that we don't have now?

- Energy is always the hardest thing.

If you're gonna go live in Antarctica, you gotta bring coal with you, or, you know, diesel fuel or something.

There's not enough sunlight down there.

So it's similar going to Antarctica or going to the moon, just a little further.

So how do you get your energy?

That is kind of one of the biggest obstacles.

And daytime on the moon lasts about two weeks, and nighttime on the moon lasts two weeks.

And if nighttime lasts two weeks and you're solar powered, you're done, unless you've got some incredible battery capability.

So power on the moon has always been one of the biggest obstacles as soon as we know that we can find a way to get there.

And so we're trying to crack that in a few different ways.

There's almost always sunlight at the poles, so you can get solar.

But if you're running bulldozers, there are no solar powered bulldozers on Earth.

And so we need better.

And that's why now there's a lot of work in either beaming power down from orbiting satellites, or getting some sort of nuclear power on the surface as well, which a lot of people are working on.

So that's one of the biggest obstacles.

Second one went back to what you said at the opening, Ian, and that is, you know, setting up a permanent outpost on the moon.

One of the things we don't really know is, can a human being develop from conception through birth, through adolescence to adulthood, anywhere besides Earth?

We don't know the answer to that question.

How much gravity does it take for a human being to develop in a healthy way?

And on the space station, there's none.

And so your body is not going to develop properly.

Maybe the moon's gravity is enough, maybe one sixth of the Earth's gravity is enough to make your balance system and your musculature and your bones and your eyeballs and everything all work together properly.

Maybe it'd have to be Mars with like one third of Earth's gravity.

Or maybe we need more than that.

So we need power because once you have enough power, then you can set up a habitat and solve all those other problems.

The second is, is it a place where people can actually live a full life cycle?

Or is it a place that we could only have adult humans visit?

That's going to really determine the future of humanity on the moon.

- Now, I was glad you mentioned Antarctica.

And because in part, you know, it's, a lot of countries are represented there, but they're not competing.

It's being used for science, and it's not being exploited for resources, and it's not being militarized in any way.

We frequently, we talk about space, we talk about a space race, and of course we had the Americans and the Russians, and now we have the Americans and the Chinese, and the Indians have a program, Europeans have a program.

Is it a space race?

Is that the right way to think about it?

Or are we on a path to being able to treat the moon the way we treat Antarctica?

- We do best when there's competition.

It's kind of our fundamental nature.

You know, it's why we have the Olympics or the World Cup or any of those competitions.

If nobody kept score and the outcome didn't matter, then no one would go to the games, right?

Competition is just fundamentally human.

And so a race, nothing wrong with a race.

You've got to define what victory looks like.

And you've got to set bounds, you know, how long is this race going to go on?

Antarctica is an interesting parallel because it was a race and it was a land grab.

And then it was a big geopolitical hot potato.

And then in 1957, we had the International Geophysical Year.

And around that time, we all decided we've got to come up with a collective plan.

This is the last great unoccupied continent on Earth.

We need to not settle it like we did the other continents, sort of a no plan and just, you know, willy nilly and get in there and kill all the slow moving mammals and, you know, just make a mess of it all.

So we settled Antarctica different than any other continent since we left Africa, whatever, 100,000 years ago.

That's a really interesting model.

It gives us a good, clear leverage that we can settle the moon differently than we have settled other places, not just pure economic or geopolitical competition.

But Antarctica is a real mess.

Also, they set up the Antarctic Treaty System, but that's going to basically lapse in 2047, 2048.

And there's already the major powers, including China, are maneuvering so that when those treaties lapse, as maybe they eventually will, then someone can come in and start mining it for the mineral resources or, or getting more into a race of normal human behavior.

So it does provide us, and the International Space Station also shows us that we could work cooperatively as multi-nations with a different set of laws off Earth than anywhere on Earth.

- I mean, is this a conversation that the Americans and the Chinese should be having together?

Is it one where like the private sector corporations that are actually putting the most stuff up in orbit right now.

What's the path?

I mean, at the end of the day, of course, governments are going to have a lot to say about this.

Yeah, and private industry will have a lot to say about it, depending on how much it costs to get there and what are the rules on launching lunar vehicles.

So where we are in history right now is the United States, obviously, is the only nation to have ever landed on the moon with people and has the Artemis Accords, and almost half the countries in the world have signed up to be part of the Artemis Accords to use that model to start putting permanent habitation on the moon.

The Chinese have the International Lunar Research Station, ILRS, same sort of idea.

They have the capability, they haven't put people there, but they have landed in steadily increasing complexity of robots on the moon, they have a satellite orbiting the moon for communications.

And on their International Lunar Research Station, has on the order of a dozen countries and organizations that are members.

So right now, we're kind of two entities headed for the same piece of real estate.

How then, in an ideal world, would we find a way to settle the moon?

And then, given the fact that the world's never been ideal, how do we get people to the table to talk to each other that otherwise are not talking to each other?

And that probably isn't going to happen through governments.

It might happen through the United Nations.

It might happen through various corporations cooperating, but they can be pretty hamstrung by their governments.

Or it might happen through academia and science and NGOs who are providing the bridge in order for people to cooperate.

And it's probably gonna be a combination of all of those.

And it's not gonna go perfectly by any means, but boy, I'm in the thick of the fight to try and make it go as well as I can possibly help.

- So, I mean, we've talked already about two of the big changes that have occurred since you and I were pups.

The biggest one that you and I have seen in the past few years is that suddenly companies are doing a hell of a lot, right?

And I'm wondering how has the involvement and even the driving of so many of these missions from private sector corporations led by very different people with very different ideas, very different missions, even very different value sets, how is it changing our experience collectively of space?

- Yeah, there has been a sanctity and a purity to space flight, sort of as an ethos, because it was so dangerous at the start and so complex in order to make it safe enough to do it that no one could afford it except trillionaires.

And even trillionaires is not a big enough number now, but whatever, trillionaires back in the early '60s.

You had to be the United States of America or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic Russia.

No one else could afford it.

If we wanna have more opportunity, then it needs to have accessibility.

But how do we keep it from just being chaos?

How do we retrofit regulation onto it?

So not only does it allow people to use the best of their creative abilities, but also how does it then not just serve one small group's, I don't know, individual or greedy or colloquial aims.

How does it best as possible start serving the collective good?

And there were only a few choke points.

One of the choke points is you are not allowed to launch unless.

And that is at the country level.

There's not that many countries can launch lunar rockets, but you are not allowed to launch from this national territory unless you meet these criteria.

And that has helped control the wild, wild west of what's happening.

But as the cost continues to drop, it just gets harder and harder to maintain that original ethos of purity and scientific purpose and not just turn it into a marketplace.

And so regulation always lags technology, but at the same time, we're still here after 10,000 years of civilization and regulation has always lagged technology.

And I'm confident we can figure it out, but it's not going to happen without a whole bunch of work.

- So Mars apparently is next.

Why there?

I mean, I get it from the movie perspective.

It's cinematic, but, you know, a third of the gravity, you said.

But is that what we should be focused on?

- It's impossible right now.

We do not have a vehicle that can take people to Mars.

We can send robots there.

And robots are great, right?

They can tell you what temperature it is and, you know, whether the wind's blowing and they can do drilling and stuff.

That's terrific.

But a thermometer doesn't care what temperature it is.

And they have no innate purpose to what's happening.

And, you know, I've heard people say, oh, well, you know, why would we ever risk human life to go there?

Well, do you still live in the house that your parents brought you home to when you were born?

You have to go see.

It's just fundamental to human development, but also just to our fundamental nature.

We are curious and we need to explore and we need, we do it for humanity's sake, not for robots' sake.

Nobody ever needs to go to the Taj Mahal again.

Everything that has ever been seen is already written.

You'll be able to get online and see videos of it.

You can read everything about it.

But hundreds of thousands of people go to the Taj Mahal every single year because it's the human experience that matters.

That's really, that's the only thing that matters.

It's why we organize everything.

And so, yeah, we should send robots until we've got the technology solid enough that we have a pretty good shot of not killing people.

And if we play Mars right, when the first human beings land on Mars, a robot will hand them a martini and we'll be away.

- So not everyone that's watching this knows, you spent almost six months on the International Space Station.

And I'm wondering, you know, with all of that time, what's the thing that you thought would be remarkably hard to do in space that it actually turns out to be really easy?

- Sleep.

It is so lovely to be able, just picture next time you get a chance, nice hot day, you know, in New York, jump into a swimming pool and then let just enough air out of your lungs that you're just barely floating, sort of neutrally buoyant in the water, and then relax every muscle in your body so that your arms float up and your knees bend a little, your head tips forward.

And then imagine you could stay like that and sleep a whole night with every muscle relaxed.

It is the most beautiful, comfortable thing.

You don't have to roll over, don't need a pillow, your shoulder doesn't get sore.

And you don't need a mattress.

You know, it's just so... I think if we ever get space spas up there, it'll be for the sleep that people want to go.

And the other is truly understanding the world, because you go around it every 90 minutes.

So that makes me eternally optimistic that Earth's not going anywhere, life isn't going anywhere.

We just have to try and work collectively to give us good quality of life to as many people as possible.

You can come across any city anywhere.

And it's the same pattern of human decision making and, and shared human joys and hopes for life.

And the whole us and them thing kind of gets gets blurred when you go around the world 16 times a day, and you see the arbitrary and changing nature of the little walls and borders we erect between each other.

And so it, I'm not any sort of, you know, Pamby Pollyanna kind of stuff.

I recognize the imperfection of humanity.

But at the same time, we do magnificent, beautiful things.

And, and seeing the world the way I've seen it, gives me great hope and optimism.

Chris Hadfield, really good to see you again.

Good to see you also.

And now to bring you back down to Earth, I've got your puppet regime.

What?

Aliens are coming?

Hot ones like Melania are the ones that Steve Miller's gonna... Real ones?

From space?

From space?

From space.

From space.

From space!

Greetings, alien life forms.

Wait a minute, I thought you're the aliens.

Right, but from our perspective, you're the aliens.

What is this, some kind of cognitive test?

I mean... - Let's continue.

Who is the leader of this planet?

The leader of the universe, Donald J. Trump.

- Why does he get to be leader?

I represent more than a billion earthlings.

Well, so do I. Why should you be leader?

You can't even squash a cockroach, and you want to deal with aliens?

Don't you start with... Fight, fight, fight, fight.

I love it.

- Earthlings, pull yourselves together.

We come in peace.

As a gesture of intergalactic goodwill, we carry a special gift.

A formula for everlasting peace!

The end to all wars.

I don't like it.

Agreed.

Can't stop, won't stop.

What kind of radical idiot would promise no more wars?

Can you guys bomb Iran?

Let's build a Trump resort in your galaxy.

Kill the roaches.

Can't stop, won't stop.

Can't stop, won't stop.

Europe will reply to intergalactic messages in September.

That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, but you're already drafting a lunar business plan, why don't you come check us out at GZEROmedia.com [music] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is investing in the future, working to create an impact in advanced recycling and an emerging technology companies that will help shape tomorrow.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, and... ♪♪♪♪♪