Artemis II was on its way around the Moon when we sat down with Dr. Neil Helm. We asked him whether we are living through a new era of space exploration or a new era of space storytelling.
Neil started on a space tracking team as a teenager with a top secret clearance. He worked through ComSat and DARPA and spent decades around the policy and technology circles that shaped the modern space age.
We talk about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). Neil describes his part in a group hosted by the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, that reviewed reports across all of space, including UFO reports and the possibility of nonhuman intelligence. He describes how its summaries went up through official channels. Disclosure here means governments releasing what they know about UAP. We ask what it looks like in practice and who filters the information. We also ask why the public feels more ready today than it did in the 1990s. These are Neil’s accounts, and we take them as outside information to run against orientation.
The human body
Then we turn to the human body, where talk about Moon bases and Mars missions rarely stays. Radiation exposure, abrasive lunar dust and long-duration health effects all come up. So does the gap between optimistic talking points and medical reality. Neil compares NASA messaging with reports from Russian cosmonauts. We also ask what it would really take to live off Earth.
The inner frontier
Neil connects the outer frontier to the inner one. He tells about his near-death experience, his spiritual practice, and his interest in consciousness, dreams and telepathy. Orientation sits at the center of John Boyd’s real OODA loop, and new information is one of the inputs that shapes it. An episode like this one tests how much outside information each of us can take in before we dismiss it.
What is your line between possible and promised when it comes to the Moon and Mars?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.