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You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on 6 April 2026 on Monaco Radio.
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Is this week's Iran peace deal any more plausible than its predecessors? Another country decides Ukraine is a more useful friend than Russia. And the crew of Artemis 2 head for the dark side. I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts. Hello, and welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Alex von Tunzelman and Ash Bhardwaj will be here to discuss the day's big stories. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Alex von Tonzelman, historian, author and screenwriter, and by Ash Bhardwaj, journalist and author, most recently of why We Travel. Hello to you both. Hello, Alex. You are, I know for a fact, just back from one of my favourite cities. Big hello to all our listeners in Vilnius. It was your first visit.
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It was. I absolutely loved it. And actually you gave me a very good recommendation of the Church of Peter and Paul.
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B
That's the one.
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A
It's an absolute banger.
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C
It is.
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B
That's what all the guidebooks say. Yeah. Do you want to describe your first impressions? I mean, I've been there several times now and even speaking as a not terrifically or indeed remotely religious person, sort of gaze up at that interior. It is, well. Oh, my God. Does seem the appropriate phrase.
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A
Pretty extraordinary, isn't it? It's actually not. I don't think I've ever seen anything else quite like it. It is really very, very special. And. Yeah, I mean, but of course, if you do like churches, I mean, I was in Riga for a few days and then Vilnius for a few days. I mean, you've got churches galore. I mean, as many as you want. But that one really was the standout for me.
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B
So a hard recommend for Vilnius.
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A
Absolutely. Excellence is correct.
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And no shade on Riga. I just haven't been there for ages.
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No, it's also wonderful and it's nice to do both together. You can now do all the way from Helsinki down to Vilnius if you want to, or back up and do all the Baltics in one go.
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B
And before we get any vexed emails from our many listeners in Tallinn, also delightful. Have been there. Yes, yes, yes, have been there.
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A
Would do again where my family is from, so.
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B
Well, there you go, Ash. You are shortly going to a country about which I. Well, I mean, I know a bit because I've read books. I've never actually been there, been curious to go. This is Vietnam, your first time as well?
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C
It is my first time. It's one of those places I really wanted to get to back when I was backpacking, but never quite got round to it. And this time I am going with my wife, my three year old daughter and my three month old son. So a very different experience to the back.
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B
You'll be popular people on the plane.
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C
Well, if the jet fuel gets us there. But the, the thing that's really interesting about Vietnam is it's 30 years since they made it much easier for foreigners to not just visit the country but to also travel freely around it. I'm going with a company that was founded. They started by doing group trips orderly. They started by doing group trips to Vietnam. Now they're known for their sort of luxury boutique stuff. So this is an independent family trip. It'll be amazing to see how it's changed. And I'm spending time with some guides who are on that first trip back with Audley 30 years ago. So it'd be really good to get it through their perspective. How has the nation changed and how has tourism changed in Vietnam?
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B
Well, I look forward to hearing about that when you are back again. As you were saying, assuming you actually get there, a topic to which we shall return. But we will start with Iran, the war therein and what is rapidly becoming the traditional late weekend floating of some sort of possible ceasefire deal with a view to preventing US markets from cratering. At Monday opening, US President Donald Trump has made one of his claims that a deal can be reached before some imminent but maddeningly unspecified juncture accompanied by the usual portents of apocalyptic alternative. Yesterday, Trump addressed the Islamic Republic in bracingly direct terms. Open the fucken straight, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell. Signing curiously off with praise be to Allah. A sentiment which would have consumed several months of pervert fo news coverage if declared by Barack Obama on Easter Sunday. Alex, in the last few minutes, Iran has rejected this week's US ceasefire proposal. They want a definitive end of the war. Their list of demands includes, it says here, an end to hostilities and a protocol to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of sanctions. How well would you say all this is going to.
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Well, quite well for Iran by that list of things.
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To cite one of the obvious comparisons, I am asking you as the author of a very good book about the suez crisis of 1956.
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A
Yes, of which certain parallels are quite apparent at the moment. Particularly perhaps thinking about when Gamal Abdel Nasser shut the Suez Canal by sinking block ships in it, immediately stopping world trade. And particularly to the uk, of course, who got all their oil from, oh, Iran in those days. Fancy that. That was the oil that was priced in pounds and Britain did not have enough dollar reserves to buy the oil that was priced in dollars, which is why the Americans were able to make Britain stop. But that, of course, is history. We're looking at the present day. Although, yes, a situation where some parallels certainly exist. I think it's going pretty badly for the us. I mean, we are into the second month of this. That was originally sort of mooted as a kind of two to three week operation. It does seem that there was very little planning, possibly little expectation that the Straits of Hormuz would be shut. And now Iran holds that pretty major card, which, of course is why they're pushing for things like an end to sanctions.
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B
But just to follow that up quickly, does that still not strike you as one of the most extraordinary details of this? Because I am by no means any sort of expert in geopolitics and grand strategy, but even I would understand that the first thing Iran would be likely to do in extremis is close the Strait of Hormuz. And everything I have read by people who do deal with this stuff for a living says, yeah, we've been gaming this for decades.
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A
I mean, and that's like the thing that's sort of the student level 101 strategy. I mean, it's really basic to know about that and you really do just have to look at a map. So it does seem extraordinary if they didn't know that was going to happen and then they sort of tried to work this. Oh, we did know. But then why didn't you plan for it? I mean, so it's sort of, you know, that we're sort of sitting here going, surely they must have known that. But looking at the reality and going, well, perhaps they actually didn't. Perhaps we shouldn't underestimate just how foolhardy this operation really is.
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Ash, President Trump is threatening, and I quote, to blow up everything. Has he arrived at the point at which he has made so many picturesque and spectacular threats that even the people on the potentially the awesome receiving end of American firepower are just going, yeah, pal, whatever.
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C
I don't really know who he's communicating to with these tweets and his pronouncements. I don't think he's communicating to the Iranians or his allies or even to the US Military with this stuff. I think more than anything, it's just a way to rile up his base and make them think that he's doing something exciting and doing something compelling and doing something good. Because he's made so many pronouncements about the war, ending this very impressive operation to recover the Wizzo, not the pilot, but the other person in the F15E that was shot down. He on that day said, well, it's all done, we've completed the war. And then the next day he does this outrageous tweet which. And what can you really make of all of this? Within this, there has also been this threat to attack power plants, to attack bridges, to attack desalination plants. There's some question about whether or not that might stray into war crimes, because it's not really military necessity. And worryingly, we're starting to see a response from the United States that is very similar to what Russia has done with Ukraine, which is we've been unable to compel you to do what we want you to do militarily. Therefore, we will effectively conduct a campaign of civil terror in order to compel the population to put pressure on the government. And we've seen from the blitz in the UK back during World War II, through what's happened in Ukraine to this potential operation to do the same thing in Iran. It doesn't have the effect that you want when you start to attack civilian infrastructure.
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B
Well, indeed not. And on that comparison, we are of course, now in the fifth year of Russia's 72 hour conquest of Ukraine. Alex, Pakistan seems to be trying to position itself as a mediator. They have pitched a 45 day ceasefire pending some sort of binding agreement. But would that not require. Well, first of all, it requires Iran and the United States to take Pakistan seriously as a mediator. And I'm not sure how much I would bet on that. But it also requires both the US And Iran to be willing essentially to call this a draw. And I don't think either party is in that place.
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I think that is currently the biggest probable stumbling block here is that let's add another stumbling block, which is that Israel doesn't want the water end.
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B
Well, indeed not.
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A
And Israel and the US do not seem to have any kind of unified objective in terms of the outcome they want to see. I mean, we've had Trump again today, for instance, saying that this war is like a gift to the Iranian people and they should rise up and overthrow their government. So again, it's sort of become about a regime change thing, but of course, that's not happening. And, you know, meanwhile, the Americans are sort of searching around for people to install as a potential head of government, and then every time they find one, Israel kills them. So, I mean, there's a sort of, you know, ongoing chaos of that situation as well. I mean, so I think there are some very serious problems there. I mean, I think, yes, Pakistan has positioned itself as a negotiator. So have Egypt and Turkey, to some extent, there's negotiators from all these places working. I mean, as you say, there's maybe questions about how seriously they're taken by either side in all three cases, I think. But, you know, somebody's trying. But ultimately, I think when you've got, as you say, those sort of, you know, Iran and the US not wanting at the moment to back down and Israel wanting to do something else entirely, then I'm just not quite seeing where their incentives are.
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C
And the challenge for the United States is their strategic objectives are not clear to themselves, let alone to any negotiators or to the Iranians. For the Israelis, they simply want to reduce the potential threat of Iran to their nation. They don't really care how that happens. They don't care if the regime fails, whatever. They just reduce the threat. They saw an opportunity after the defanging of Hezbollah and Hamas over the last couple of years. So it's great. A, a good chance they would not get kickback. For the Americans, though, I think Trump seems to just be working through objectives all the time. And for a military, if you do not know what your political leaders strategic objectives are, or if those objectives change, then there's no chance of you delivering an effective military plan.
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Well, the latest news is that President Trump has just now mounted the podium at the White House and is conducting some sort of news conference. So everything we've just spent the last 10 minutes discussing could be completely irrelevant. Apologies to any listeners who are playing this back several hours, hours from now and have got no idea what we're talking about. We will move on to Syria, where, as has been widely noted, its president, Ahmed Al Sharar, has been on quite the journey these last 16 months. Exactly that time ago, under the nom de gehr, Abu Mohammad Al Jelani, he was a jihadist militia commander holed up in Idlib, a designated and or wanted terrorist in much of the Western world, and probably did not envisage himself kicking out a red carpet towards the Jewish leader of a European country anytime soon. How times change, etc. Over the weekend, President Alsharra. Welcome to Damascus. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine. The pair announced plans to cooperate on defence and food supplies. It follows Zelenskyy's recent visits to the currently beleaguered Gulf states. Alex, this is a country. I mean, you know, I'm telling a historian that, gee, history's weird, isn't it? But two years ago Syria was an ally of Russia. You get the impression Zelenskyy enjoyed this one, don't you?
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A
You do, rather. How times change. I mean, I'm sure two years ago Zelen imagine himself waltzing into Damascus and that must have been a very far thought from his mind. Indeed. It's pretty extraordinary in some ways, isn't it? I mean, although of course what's happening is that all of these things are a very complicated series of quite delicate arrangements. I mean, you must remember that Bashar Al Assad is still in Moscow. Indeed he is so being by all reports, deeply miserable, but not allowed to move to the Gulf where he'd rather be, although.
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B
And keeping away from upstairs windows.
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A
Yes, I would stay on the ground floor if I were him and probably, probably not take any interior flights either. But yes, but he's still there. I mean, I don't think there's an enormous amount of interest in him from the Russian government at this point, but they are clearly associated with that old regime that is not popular at all in Syria. Syria is trying to establish itself and indeed the president of Syria, as you said, is trying to establish themselves as really quite a different regime in a different country. This is a very interesting move and it also implies that they sort of wouldn't mind some Europeans and so on noticing that this is happening as well.
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B
I mean, are we seeing here, ash, though, a potential future Ukraine? I mean, the arsenal of the west and indeed the arsenal of the Middle East.
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C
President Zelenskyy has played an amazing hand in strategic communications. And if you think back to that meeting in the White House when he was told you have no cards to play. Rather than countering that misinformation, he simply gone out and created an alternative narrative. And this conflict in the Gulf in the Middle east is certainly a risk for Ukraine, particularly because there are less Patriot missiles going to Ukraine. We've seen Russia step up their attacks through ballistic missiles and other things that require Patriot missiles to counter them. So it is a threat to Ukraine, but what Ukraine is doing is visiting these places and demonstrating that it has a capability that nobody else has with these miniature, miniature patriots, these small drones that they can use to counter incoming drones. The Iranian shahed, the Russian Guran. And he has gone around and demonstrated that he has something to offer. And in doing so, he's countered the challenge that the GCC countries, Qatar, Oman, uae, Saudi, have, which is that the United States is no longer a stable ally. The United States choice to go to war in Iran has created this problem for them. If they instead can have a security and military partner with Ukraine who isn't going to go around causing those sorts of problems for them, but is offering them something that they really need. That's an extremely good situation for Zelenskyy and of course, to see in Syria. There's two Russian bases still there, Tartus and Khamenei Kamehami. If those two bases are effectively given up by Syria in return for something from Zelenskyy, that's a great thing for Zelenskyy to have achieved. It's not likely to happen soon. The Syrian military heavily dependent on Russian support for its weapon systems.
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I mean, is Zelenskyy's pitch here? Basically? I mean, he is making a bit of a silk purse out of a pig's ear, Alex, because initially it was thought that this war in Iran is a disaster for Ukraine for some of the reasons. Ash mentions that US attention and supplies, to the extent that Ukraine was still receiving any, will be concentrated on this. A spike in oil prices generates revenue for Russia. But Zelenskyy's got on a plane and traveled to the Middle Eastern capitals and seems to the pitch, you are much better off with Ukraine as a friend than with Russia.
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Well, when life throws you lemons, you make lemonade, don't you? And I mean that very much. I think that's what's going on. And I mean, again, I think we see Zelenskyy as an extraordinarily adept operator, actually. And I think that's been one of his great strengths, really, for his entire presidency and for this entire duration of this horrendous war. He has proved incredibly adaptable and rather imaginative about. As Ash says, it's actually setting a narrative and it's about changing a narrative and taking one over. And he's been really very smart about
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that and completely changing the way Ukraine is perceived. Rather than it being a nation that takes military support, it's a nation that gives military support and gives something that nobody else can do, which is heavily needed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and uae.
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B
I mean, on the subject, we should deviate slightly, Alex, of Russia's allies being picked off. There is an election in Hungary this weekend. How big a deal is it if Orban finally gets unloaded?
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Pretty big, I would say, to give you a sort of level of bigness.
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B
I mean, we are also back in the realm of 1956, aren't we? Because the crisis in Hungary was intimately linked with the one in Suez.
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Well, indeed. How history repeats itself. First as fast, second as fast in this particular case, but yes.
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B
Are your publishers re issuing that book, the title of which you can go ahead and remind our listeners of Blood and Sand.
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A
Yep. It's about Suez and Hungary because they happened in the same week. The Hungarian rebellion, the first major rebellion against so. And the Suez crisis, Suez war specifically. But yes, I mean, effectively these things. Well, you sort of talked about the geopolitical links of these things that sort of run through and around them. It is all rather extraordinary.
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B
I mean, we have seen. It's hard to know what is going on with this pipeline story, Ash, this idea that somebody was attempting to blow up some sort of pipeline in Hungary's vicinity. And a lot of suggestion that, in fact, Orban and his friends have contrived this. But if Orban does go, Russia doesn't really have that many what you might think of as actual allies left, does it?
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C
No, I mean, it's lost Assad in Syria, Iran is under great strain. And Slovakia. Yeah, they've still got. They've still got an ally there, potentially. But it's Hungary that's doing the real spoiling in the European Union for funding going to Ukraine. It can be a spoiler in NATO as well. And. And to lose or ban would mean that they would lose their main tool of disruption within the European Union. And Hungary and Slovakia, I think they're the only two countries within the European Union and NATO more widely who are still taking oil from Russia.
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B
Correct.
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C
And there was this big thing last year about the Baltic connector and disconnecting from supplies from Russia, and Orban's been using that as a tool of influence to say, look, we don't need to have conflict with Russia and it's only because of these Ukrainians that we're in any kind of trouble at all. His political campaign, from what I've seen from the outside, has been very much about this Brussels, Berlin, Kyiv axis that's going to pull Hungary into war. That's the reason we're not doing very well. But as I understand it, Hungary has developed less than any of the other countries that have joined the European Union under that particular tranche of countries that joined. And so it does a lot of things. It re emboldens the European Union, re emboldens NATO if he goes. And yeah, Russia loses one of its main tools of leverage and influence.
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B
Well, to what we may call the general state of things. And listeners in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere with memories reaching back six years may recall reading of something beginning to curtail everyday life in Asia in 2020 and wondering when it would get to them in Asia. Right now, national governments are cutting working hours and closing shops early, mandating working from home and imposing some rationing. All responses to the ongoing constriction of the Strait of Hormuz. The first straw in the wind in Europe may be the cancellation or reduction of flight. The price of jet fuel has more than doubled in the last month. And Ash, first of all, this is a, it's a huge deal, you would think, obviously. But one telling stat I read was United Airlines was saying that if prices stay at this level, that adds to their outgoing operating costs $11 billion. The most money United has ever made in its best year was less than half of that.
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C
That and you see the differences between different airlines here because, for example, EasyJet and British Airways, they buy their jet fuel prices in advance so they can guarantee that they know what their operating margins are over this year.
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B
But it doesn't last forever.
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C
But it doesn't last forever. And will this crisis continue for another 12 months? Even if the Straits of Hormuz were to open tomorrow, the impact on jet fuel prices will continue. The, the impact on other forms of fuel is starting to become obvious. Countries are going to make it. They're going to try and push a switch to EVs faster. That's going to be something that will happen. But yeah, this could quite quickly end up being the kind of situation that we saw with constraints on aviation through Covid. Maybe not to quite that extent, but certainly short distance business travel, things like that are going to be heavily impacted because even separate to airlines getting into financial trouble, if you're a business and suddenly your cost of sending somebody somewhere has tripled, you're not going to be making those choices. This is how this starts to have an impact on the wider global economy as well.
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B
Alex, how confident would you be about any airborne holidays you may have booked for this summer?
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A
I'm quite glad that I booked them ahead and I'm not paying for them now. I have comprehensive travel insurance in the event that any airlines collapse. And I would suggest that your listeners should do the same because I do think that actually Yeah, I mean, for some, as Ash has said, some of these companies do hedge their purchases or they, you know, agree their prices in advance, some don't. And I fear that's going to be quite a sharp end for a lot of people. It could be. Particularly for certain carriers, that could be a real problem.
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C
And we're seeing rationing in Italy. They're already starting to ration and that has led to some cancellations of flights further down, down the line. I'm traveling to Vietnam, I'm sure.
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B
So you think or potentially maybe your family's moving there?
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C
Well, I suspect the international flight there, they'll probably ensure that that jet fuel is allocated, but it'll be the internal flights that might be more challenging. Where there's alternative forms of transport, I suspect those will be the ones that will start to go quickly.
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B
I mean, just to follow that up, Ash, because I'm interested in the long term of this and my barometer is always flights from London to Australia, because I do that at least once a year because that's where all my family are. And I have noticed that six years since COVID they are still much, much more expensive than they were before COVID I mean, do we need to start thinking that that age of, you know, basically cheap air travel is. Is done?
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C
Yeah, absolutely. I think that there probably were two golden ages of air travel. One was before 911 and the other one was before COVID and after 9 11. Of course you had the change in the way security was done in airports. By the time you got to just before COVID most of that we all knew how to get through airports. The systems were starting to work pretty well and it was easy to travel to lots of places. It was affordable. The knock on effect of COVID the entire tourism and travel industry is still trying to make up for the losses in that time, pay back any debts, those sorts of things. It won't take much for many companies to start to go after this. When you start to see these costs rising, people won't travel. I mean, the impact already from what has been going on in the Gulf means that people are not traveling those distances. More people are traveling around Europe, for example, from London and through Europe rather than going east of the Gulf. And that means that those flights within Europe are more expensive. People are moving to trains where they can, but then trains become expensive. Yeah, I just think people are going to be less willing to travel those long distances and therefore airlines are going to start to have pressure on them. There's going to be less people wanting to fly. The impact is going to be long term, definitely.
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B
I mean, I did want to close this item by asking you about some alternatives. And Alex, we have had this conversation before. You are quite a proponent of what I think we might think of as long haul rail travel.
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A
I love it.
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B
You maintain that sort of city breaks in Europe from London can be done by rail?
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A
They can, I would particularly argue. So my favourite is if you manage to get the real red eye Eurostar at six in the morning, you can have your toes in the Med at Barcelona by 4:30pm and that's pretty good. Just one change in Paris and a nice tgv and so no, I'm a big fan of this. And actually between Riga and Vilnius, of course I took that train. I mean, you know, I think most European trains are lovely and many are reasonably priced. If you book in advance, get your special offers in. The only problem is of course the time. So as I say, Barcelona is a particularly good quick route from London. But of course, you know, if you are thinking about a sort of a longer trip, then if it's adding sort of three or four days to your holiday each side, that could be a bit tricky.
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C
And certainly for a lot of places taking the train can often be quicker. If you're based on London, going from London, it is faster than taking air because you have to get to the airport, go through the airport, wait for security disruptions can happen. Then at the far end, you're not arriving into the city, you're arriving at an airport 20, 30 minutes out of the city, your destination and then you have to get in. So it can be faster, it's much more enjoyable. I'm planning a trip with my 3 year old daughter to the Hague. Later on in the summer, take the train London to Rotterdam, Rotterdam to the Hague and it will be lovely. I mean, I don't know how the flight to Vietnam's gonna go. That idea of taking trains is just such an enjoyable experience and there's just less of the friction and stress.
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B
Also the Hague, I maintain, massively undersold European destination. Lovely, lovely city. Just finally though, on this one, Ash, for our British based listeners, do you want to pick somewhere in this country they could go to instead? If it turns out they can't go where they thought they were in the
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C
summer, I'm really enjoying trips down to the South Downs, Sussex. Battle's a really interesting place to go in the next year or so.
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B
Mention Battle before. Are you sure you're not working for them?
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C
I am not working for them. But it is an interesting place. Also getting out to the fens, so Lincolnshire, through to Norfolk. Beautiful, amazing light, gorgeous part of the country.
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B
Well, we'll now move along to aviators who did get out ahead of the fuel shortage, specifically the four crew of Artemis 2. Later tonight, UK time, they will embark on one of the most technically and psychologically challenging portions of their mission. For about 40 minutes, when Artemis flies around the back of the moon, they will be out of sight and out of reach. And if they're extremely unfortunate, involuntarily humming something dreadful by Pink Floyd. The first people to do this, not the Pink Floyd bit it was 1968, were the crew of Apollo 8, one of whom Colonel Frank Borman described the view as vast, lonely and forbidding and a great expanse of nothing. Which ironically is a pretty accurate description of Pink Floyd's discography. Also ironically, a cutout of Borman's face. I only found this out this afternoon. I'm really excited. Does appear on the COVID of 1969's Led Zeppelin 2. The artist responsible apparently thought it was Neil Armstrong. Well, close enough, close enough, exactly. Alex, are you excited about this?
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A
It's pretty amazing, isn't it?
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B
It is.
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A
I mean, you know, and I, I think I, I was too late. I mean, as many of us were, of course, you know, even though now quite middle aged. By the time I was, when a kid, the great age of lunar exploration was already really ramping down. And then when I was a kid, obviously the Challenger disaster happened, which I think was just so off putting. I think, you know, children in my generation did not fantasize about this in the way that children 10 years or 20 years earlier really, really had. But this is pretty great, isn't it? And I mean some pretty fabulous images coming in and I'm sure there'll be many more. And so, yes, I think, I think it is exciting and I think we, you know, the jet fuel aside, it does seem rather wonderful to be able to do such things still and still rather extraordinary that you can actually get humans to the moon, around it, close to it.
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B
I mean, Ash, you are a professional traveler, obviously. I did want to read you an excerpt from. It's an extraordinary book. Michael Collins memoir, Carrying the Fire. He was the, he did this trip by himself in the Apollo 11 capture while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the moon. And he wrote of that moment. I am alone now, truly alone and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be 3 billion plus 2 over on the other side of the moon, and 1 plus God knows what on this side.
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C
And it is remarkable. Collins and indeed all of the command module pilots for the Apollo missions that landed on the moon, because the Apollo module went over to the moon, one bit went down, landed, and then there was one astronaut left flying around, and, and I can't imagine what it would be like, that sense of remoteness. There's no other possibility as a human being for you to be that disconnected from all of the rest of humanity.
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B
More prosaically and less poetically, though, the book is absolutely wonderful and I recommend it to our listeners. He did also later speak of, frankly, his profound relief that it just shut ground control off for a bit. Like for the first time in three days, he was getting bombarded with messages
- [29:36]
C
from Houston, not having to do little bits and pieces in the, in the module. Yeah, I, I'm really excited by this. I've been a space geek all my life and I do remember the shuttle program. I remember Challenger and then, of course, Columbia, and then the end of that very complicated, amazing machine. And the ambition is something that I feel I haven't seen in sort of humanity, for one. If I want to be a bit more grand about it, since the end of the Cold War and then the beginning of the Great War, the War on Terror, we've just sort of seen this managing and fighting fires of things that are going wrong with humanity. And to set ourselves an ambition and a goal to go and try and do it is grand. And actually, this particular project, Artemis will be going further than any of the Apollo missions because it's taking a wider loop around the moon. It's not going into orbit of the moon, so it's not going round and round many times. And therefore it will also be going faster. So it's a remarkable thing that they're doing.
- [30:40]
B
Alex While I am recommending books to people, about 20 years ago, a former colleague of mine at Melody Maker, Andrew Smith, wrote a lovely book called Moondust, in which he set out to meet the then surviving Apollo astronauts. And the great joy of the book is that we discover that these were all exceptional and yet profoundly eccentric men who were spun off even further by the. I think Andrew writes in the book that it made all of them more of what they were anyway. I mean, I have since had the. The honor of shaking the hand of one of them, Charlie Duke, who was one of those who got God in a big way on the way back. The four crew of Artemis, and I did look this up earlier. Will be the 25th, 26th, 27th and 28th people who have flown to the vicinity of the moon and obviously the first ones for half a century and change. Do we expect them to get just as freaked out or are we too knowing now?
- [31:35]
A
Well, it'll be interesting to see, won't it? And you say that makes me think that actually space fiction, not science fiction, but space fiction has produced some of our really great works actually in the last few years. Think of it. I mean, Samantha Harvey's incredible novel Orbital, that won the booker a couple of years ago, which I highly recommend going back to Tom Wolfe's the Right Stuff and actually the film based on it, which I like even more than the book. Sorry, heresy, but I do.
- [31:57]
B
It's a great film and a great book.
- [31:58]
A
Yeah. And the T TV series for all mankind, which is a fantastic alternative history
- [32:02]
C
of amazing,
- [32:04]
B
tremendously good fun.
- [32:06]
A
All very much grappling with this question because it's the existential nature of this kind of travel and the wonder of it and the fear and the danger of it. It's such. Such interesting questions about humanity. It brings up so well on that subject, Ash.
- [32:19]
B
And we did talk about this last week, but I'm going to talk about it again because it still blows my mind and I do hope the results would be different. In Australia, YouGov polled Britons as to whether. And the question was, and this is the important bit, would you go to the moon with your safety absolutely guaranteed? There is no way this can go wrong. You are coming back absolutely fine. Which is to say you have a greater guarantee of safety going to the moon in this proposition than you do going to the shops in real life. 49% of British people said they wouldn't go.
- [32:54]
C
I can't really understand that if you're guaranteed to come back. The hardest thing about space travel is the risk. It is still, despite all of the developments, despite the increases in safety, despite the excellent work that NASA has done, it is still a risky thing to do. If that's gone, I don't know why you wouldn't. There's this concept called the overview effect. I wrote about it in the book, interviewed one of the guys who were the guy who conceptualized it, which is this impact that you have by seeing Earth from a different perspective. And in particular, astronauts talk about its apparent fragility, the thinness of the atmosphere, how small and tiny it looks in this universe.
- [33:33]
B
I think it's in Andrew's book Moondust Armstrong, I think it's Armstrong speaks of holding up his thumb and blocking out
- [33:40]
C
the Earth, which is what the Artemis crew will be able to do now from where they are, they'll be able to hold up their thumb in the all of Earth. And Carl Sagan talks about this. You know, the motive, dust in a stream of sunlight. And I don't know why you wouldn't do that. One of the most compelling things in travel is awe. When you take yourself somewhere and you experience this feeling of. Of sort of connection to the universe, but also smallness of you as a human being, there could be no greater sense of awe than seeing the Earth from space. Why? Why you wouldn't want to do that? I don't understand.
- [34:14]
B
Alex, would you place yourself because there was a frankly bewildering gender split on this. Would you place yourself among the mere 31% of British women who would take this trip?
- [34:25]
A
I would, yes, I would take the trip. I mean, I would love it for exactly the reasons that I think, Ashley, as very beautifully described, I would. On the other hand, I will try and speak up a little for the others in that I think a lot of people do travel for humanity and for art and culture and these things. And to be fair, not a whole lot of that up there. So if you do want to go and see a lovely church, you are better off than Goldiers. Let's be honest.
- [34:48]
C
They did listen to Chapel Rone as they woke up this morning. So there's some art and music and culture up there.
- [34:53]
B
Ashbard Raj and Alex von Tzeman, thank you both for joining us. That is all for this, this edition of the Monocle Daily. It was produced by Anita Riota. Our sound engineer was Elliot Greenfield. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening.