When Apollo 11 launched in July 1969, Bill Nelson was an army lieutenant on leave behind the iron curtain, listening with colleagues to the BBC on shortwave radio. “There were three young Americans standing on the hills overlooking Budapest, screaming at the top of our lungs, cheering as that rocket lifted off,” Nasa’s new administrator recalled in a video interview. By the time Neil Armstrong stepped on to the lunar surface, Nelson was at a London hotel, watching on a grainy black and white TV at three in the morning. “This was all extremely fascinating to me and never in a million years did I think that I was going to end up being able to fly in space. Much more so, never in a million years would I have thought that I would try to offer some leadership to Nasa.” Nelson, who at 79 is two months older than Joe Biden, was the first member of the House of Representatives to go into space. He went on to serve as a Democratic senator for Florida for 18 years. In May he was appointed by Biden to lead Nasa and earlier this month he was in the spotlight when Vice-President Kamala Harris chaired her first meeting of the National Space Council. Nelson’s priorities include the $10bn James Webb Space Telescope, a successor to the Hubble telescope aiming to launch on Saturday after years of costly delays. Astronomers are on edge because a lot could go wrong. “There are some 300 things that have to work perfectly on this telescope,” Nelson says. “And that’s after a successful launch.” Then there is Nasa’s high stakes effort to return to the moon after half a century. The Artemis programme, a sequel to Apollo, aims to put astronauts back on the lunar surface in 2025 or soon after, establishing the first “long-term human-robotic presence” on and around the moon and laying the groundwork for the first crewed mission to Mars in the late 2030s. “Why the moon?” Nelson says. “Because the goal is Mars. What we can do on the moon is learn how to exist and survive in that hostile environment and only be three or four days away from Earth before we venture out and are months and months from Earth. That’s the whole purpose: we go back to the moon, we learn how to live there, we create habitats.” In 2023 a probe will dig down at the south pole of the moon to learn how much water there is beneath the surface. “Because if there’s water, then we’ve got rocket fuel, we’ve got hydrogen and oxygen.” Last time around the US was spurred to the moon by the Soviet Union, which had beaten it to putting the first satellite (Sputnik) and first person (Yuri Gagarin) in space. Today the principal rival is China, which Biden has made an organising principle of his presidency, and space is no exception. China established its own space station with alacrity and is only the second country to have landed a rover on Mars. Is a new space race under way and, on the basis that competition breeds success, might that be a good thing? “Yes to the space race,” Nelson replies. “I think their intention is to bring back a sample from Mars earlier than ours. I think their intention is to try to land on the moon before we land. The facts are the facts and America better pay attention. “But is that a good thing? Not really. What would be a better thing is if they were a partner like Russia has been since 1975.” Leaders of the American and Russian space agencies had a constructive relationship during the later part of the cold war; can Nelson establish a similar channel to his Chinese counterpart? “If I had my druthers I would, but you can’t have a relationship if the other party doesn’t want to have a relationship. It takes two to tango. They have indicated no interest in the two of us doing the tango.” He adds: “They’re good but they’re secretive. They’re not collaborative. They’re not transparent.” All 12 people who walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972 were white American men. In his public remarks, Nelson typically makes a point of saying that Artemis will put the first woman and first person of colour on the moon. Nasa has also produced a graphic novel, First Woman, about a fictional character called Callie Rodriguez who achieves both distinctions. What impact does he think that moment would have on girls and children of colour around the world? “Well, look what female and minority astronauts have already done. It’s caused little girls to dream dreams that they didn’t ever think possible before. Same thing with minorities.” But for now many of the headlines are stolen by billionaire white men such as Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk. Nelson does not seem perturbed about Nasa’s thunder being stolen, however. “I think it’s great they are spending their money advancing technology. They are opening up press attention and excitement by American people and then, when you add that to the Nasa programme, of which SpaceX is a big part now, it’s all the more exciting.” Musk’s SpaceX is developing a “Starship” lunar lander that can carry a gamechanging 100 tons of cargo. Enough to start building a moon base? “I hope so, but it hasn’t flown.” An unsuccessful legal challenge by Bezos’s rocket company, Blue Origin, caused a delay but Nasa is still targeting February for the first test flight of its moon rocket, the Space Launch System. Raised in Melbourne, Florida, Nelson studied at the University of Florida, Yale and University of Virginia Law School and served on active duty in the army. He began practising law then went into politics, first in the Florida state legislature, then in the US Congress. In 1986 he went from the Washington swamp to the stars on the space shuttle Columbia, orbiting the Earth 98 times over six days and conducting 12 medical experiments, including the first American stress test in space. (Just 10 days after he landed, another shuttle, Challenger, launched and almost immediately exploded, killing all seven crew members.) Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 command module pilot, once described Earth as “blue, white, very shiny … such a beautiful tiny thing, nestled in this black velvet of the rest of the universe”. William Shatner, 90, famed for playing Captain Kirk in Star Trek, rode aboard a Blue Origin rocket in October to become the oldest person in space and was struck by “the covering of blue, this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue that we have around us”. Nelson, too, has vivid memories of seeing Earth from afar. “It is so beautiful. It is so colourful. It is suspended in nothing. There’s home and yet it looks so fragile. That experience informed a lot of my public life because I wanted to be, when I returned, a better steward of our planet. “So I think you can just basically boldly say I became more of an environmentalist when I went into space, and that has informed my environmental record now going on 44 years of public service. “It also struck me as a politician that when I looked, as we orbited the Earth every 90 minutes, I didn’t see racial divisions and I didn’t see religious divisions and I didn’t see political divisions – the things that bedevil us here on the face of the Earth. What I saw, we were all citizens of planet Earth, and that’s informed my public service as well.” By way of example he describes Nasa as “the point of the spear” on the climate crisis, designing, building and launching instruments that measure the delicate balance of the environment. Nelson reveals that the agency is planning to set up a “mission control” for climate change at a still-to-be-determined location. “We’re going to allow the public to access it virtually. We’re going to encourage state and local governments as well as our fellow agencies and the federal government to access the data and make it easy for everybody so they can have informed decisions.” Whatever the shortcomings of Cop26, Nelson believes there has been a perceptible shift in public and political opinion on the issue. He notes that Republican senator Ted Cruz – who was the first to call him when news of his nomination for Nasa was leaked by the White House – “was an absolute out and out climate denier and you don’t hear him saying that that much now”. Another subject that has gone increasingly mainstream in Washington is unidentified flying objects. In June a report found that although intelligence officials do not believe aliens are responsible for dozens of accounts of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), they cannot fully explain what is. Nelson comments: “You’ve seen those films now made public. They [navy pilots] know they saw something. What is it? I don’t know. Is it an adversary on Earth that has that kind of technology? I hope not. “Do I think that there is life in the universe? The answer to that is clearly I do and we are searching for it. How can I limit a universe that is so big that I cannot see how big it is, where we are in a galaxy with billions if not trillions of stars and there are additional billions if not trillions of galaxies, and the universe is expanding?” He adds with a chuckle: “Like people that tried to limit Copernicus and Galileo that the Earth didn’t revolve about the sun, that everything revolved around the Earth. So, you get the drift.” What first contact with an alien civilisation would mean for humanity has long been the stuff of science fiction. But politicians take it seriously. After a conversation with his American counterpart in 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev recalled: “President Reagan suddenly said to me, ‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’ I said, ‘No doubt about it.’ He said, ‘We too.’ So that’s interesting.” Nelson, astronaut turned senator turned secretary of space, must be hoping that China’s Xi Jinping feels the same way about saving the planet from greenhouse gases.