For anyone who knows me, it’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of science fiction … as such, I listened to Gemini mission broadcasts on my transistor radio and glued to my television when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. Our family toured the Johnson Space Center in Houston whenever we got the chance. We held an early morning watch party for the first space shuttle launch — and watched as many other launches as I could.

It seems that, over the last year or so, the tempo of our activities in low earth orbit, the talk about another mission to the moon — like in the next four years — and eventually to Mars, has rekindled my interest. Man, it’s the stuff of science fiction!

So, I invited Eric Berger onto the show to talk about it. Eric is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space ventures, to wonky NASA policy, and is the author of the book Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s effort to send humans to Mars. Eric was at the Houston Chronicle for 17 years, where the paper was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009 for his coverage of Hurricane Ike.