, Dr. Space of The Space Show, is here as my colleague and co-host. Tonight, SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — and the question that has shadowed the field for more than half a century: if a signal arrives, what is to be done? Many people have spent decades thinking about exactly that, and we welcome one of them. Michael Garrett is chair of the SETI Permanent Committee of the International Academy of Astronautics.

The committee has just issued an update to the post-detection protocols first formalized in 1989. It is deliberately short — three or four pages, because nobody reads ten — and it sets out what to do when something appears in the data that nature cannot explain. Verify before you announce. Protect the name of the astronomer who comes forward, because online harassment is now part of the equation. And if the signal turns out to be an artifact in the telescope, say so as loudly as you said the first thing.

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, Dr. Space of the Space Show, is here as my colleague and co-pilot. Today, we are exploring the new race to the moon. Once upon a time, NASA won that race in 1969, but there is a new race on. We are privileged to bring forward two guests to guide us: Doug Messier of Substack, whose page is carefully explicating NASA's lunar ambitions, and my colleague of many years, Rick Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, who has a great deal of information about the Chinese space program. Yes, there is the Russian space program, Roscosmos—the first and most successful of the big space programs—but right now it is temporarily disengaged due to resource constraints. However, China and NASA can afford this new race, especially as NASA goes commercial, throwing itself to the mercy of space experimenters from Blue Origin to Intuitive Machines and beyond.

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, Dr. Space of the Space Show, is here as my colleague and co-pilot. Today, we are exploring the future of low-Earth orbit and beyond, focusing on a groundbreaking new approach to satellite mobility. To guide us through this new frontier, we welcome two distinguished experts: Paolo Lozano, full professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and director of the Space Propulsion Laboratory at MIT, and his colleague, Amelia "Mia" Bruno. Mia is a former postdoctoral associate at MIT's Space Propulsion Laboratory and currently serves as a principal scientist at Revolution Space.

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, Dr. Space of the Space Show, is here as my colleague and co-pilot. And we're headed to the beginning—well, near to the beginning. We're headed in the direction of the Big Bang, but along the way, we're going to discover mysteries, thanks to Andrea Ferrara of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy.

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We're going to the edge of the cosmos with a cosmologist, Patricio Gallardo. He is at the University of Pennsylvania. Most importantly, he's also simultaneously in the cosmic microwave background that becomes the edge of what we imagine to be the birth of our cosmos, our galaxy.

However, inside this, there are a number of mysteries that have come up over the last 100 years. And one of them is, are there special rules for big structures? I mean, really big.

Patricio used the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in the Atacama desert in Chile for his work and it's published in the Physical Review Letters. What was the problem you were addressing with your work and what was the solution?

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Today, we are heading into the realm of planetary defense, thanks to Rahil Makadia, who is going to help us understand the success of a mission launched in 2021 that made contact with a binary asteroid in 2022.

That contact led to “violence,” and that violence led to revelations regarding planetary defense. Rahil is here to connect all those dots for us.

DART is a successful mission. However, understanding it requires attention to physics, to the nature of asteroids, and to the ability to discern what is actually achieved when slamming into an asteroid to better protect our planet.

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We’re very, very pleased and privileged to welcome an astronomer who has been to the edge of knowledge about the cosmos: Pieter van Dokkum of the Astronomy Department at Yale University. He brings a magical term that will immediately gain my attention: a ‘runaway black hole.’ That’s right—a black hole, the singularity itself, running away and rogue in the universe.

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We welcome Anatoly Zak, who keeps the very helpful RussianSpaceWeb.com, a subscription site. I heartily recommend it for those of you who lived through the first moon rays during the Cold War of the 20th century.

Now we’re witnessing a new moon race, this time with a new player on the field: the Chinese space program.

However, in 1972, America had won the moon race. In 1969, there were subsequent moon ventures by the Russians and the Americans. We’re talking detente, and that would lead to a joint space mission in Earth orbit. But as of that point, the Russians and Roscosmos had ambition to get to the moon—and they still have ambition to get to the moon.

And it’s totally wonderful to travel to 1972, when I was a much younger fellow and didn’t see or didn’t know about all these developments in Russia. What was L3m?

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We’re going far, far away in time and space, mostly in space.

We welcome Dr. Joel Leja of Penn State University, part of an international team working on a mystery of cosmology that means everything. He is a member of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State, as well as the Institute of Computational Data and Sciences.

He’s taking us nearly 13 billion light years from here to the beginning of the—well, to the beginning!

Joel has discovered something that when I first saw it—I think it was a picture in Nature magazine—I thought, they’ve got to be kidding me. They don’t know what that is. I don’t know what it is. You called them initially when you discovered them (thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope) “little red dots.”

What did you see? What are you seeing now? And why are there more and more of them the more you look?

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Megan is the lead author of these revelations about black holes in the universe. She is a graduate student at MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Immediately this looks like important news about the black holes in the universe that we don't know about or that we don't see.

What has the James Webb Space Telescope allowed you to discover that is so fresh?

We're still dealing with, “Hey, we didn't know they could do that!”

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Starship block two, eight, nine and ten. There are questions about all three. One of them failed over the Caribbean, one of them failed over the Indian Ocean, and another one failed during a static test, failed on the stand.

I see no single pattern of these failures of Mr. Musk's genius and ask Douglas, is there one that has been discovered?

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Then something exotic that is fresh information: the thorium reactor.

We begin with the moon. Dr. Kothari’s article, published earlier this year, recommends returning to the moon without SLS (Space Launch System).

Why so?

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“Returning humans to the Moon without SLS and NRHO” by AJ Kothari on The Space Review

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The opinions expressed on this website and on The John Batchelor Show are those of John Batchelor and guests, and not those of CBS News.