Tyson: “Yeah, yeah, you’re an average person. Yeah, sure (laughing). Yeah, so I was, what I wanted to do was, if I could just sort of open up with some perspectives that I carry as a scientist, but also in a way, as sort of an emissary of the public, right? Because we just sort of watching, and rose up out of the, you know, from the firmament came the Space Force, at least that’s how people think of it, and I wanted to make sure that people understood. I think most in this audience know what I’m about to say, but if this gets posted online, it’d be nice to just sort of put it out there that many people’s first thought was that if the government creates a Space Force, then that’s a first step in the militarization of space. And all I can think of is the movies where there are sort of laser weapons and this sort of thing. And I’ve tried to remind people, or alert them, perhaps for the first time, that ever since Sputnik, space has been recognized as a strategic asset, or rather a strategic location. And so for the past 60 years, space has been the place for reconnaissance satellites, and, and navigation and, and so, so it’s not a new thing. It’s actually an old thing that is finally getting recognized in the way it needs to be, in terms of, within the, sort of the umbrella of national security. And I also try to remind people that, you know, often when people think of warfare and they think of space, they think of weapons and soldiers and armies and fighting, and, and they’re defending us, and I think to myself, well, it’s more than that. Of course, all right, wherever you have assets that you value, you will want to protect those assets, and who are you going to call, right? And if they’re national assets, you’re going to call a national, a national group to defend that, and that would be the Department of Defense. So, what do we have in space? We have satellites, of course, that monitor weather, climate, of course those are different: Your weather is what happens today and your climate are the trends over time. We have satellites that currently monitor, agriculture, checking rain. The, the humidification of regions and how that’s changing. We’ve got communication satellites, and of course, we have navigation satellites, among others. And when I think of communication satellites, you know, it’s not just, am I getting my live news broadcast from Europe? No. There’s like, Uber uses satellites, OK? So the value of our space assets is not just the cost of the design and launch of that one satellite, it’s the commerce it enables, which is rising through trillions of dollars of our commerce, and our economic stability. So, I can say to myself, OK, I don’t want anything bad to happen to that. And no matter where I am on the, sort of the peace-war spectrum, I don’t want anything bad to happen to that. And so, so at some point, we’ve got to turn to you, sir. And I’m going to ask you, do you foresee threats to our space assets? And because the total value is, is what I described, the total, meaning that it has to us in our way of life. So, do you foresee threats, and if you do, on what timescale, and are you equipping yourself to handle that? So I want to put that in your lap.”