Bill Nelson was an army lieutenant and listening to the radio when Apollo 11 launched.
Three young Americans stood on the hills overlooking Budapest, screaming at the top of their lungs, as the rocket lifted off.
Nelson was at a hotel in London in the early hours of the morning, watching a black and white TV. I never in a million years thought that I would be able to fly in space. I would never have thought that I would be able to offer leadership to Nasa.
Nelson was the first member of the House of Representatives to go into space. He served as a senator for 18 years in Florida. He was in the news earlier this month when Vice- President Harris chaired the first meeting of the National Space Council.
Nelson wants to launch the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope on Saturday after years of delays. A lot could go wrong. Nelson says there are some 300 things that need to work perfectly on the telescope. After a successful launch.
After half a century, there is a high stakes attempt by Nasa to return to the moon. The Artemis programme aims to put astronauts back on the moon in the next decade or so, and then to establish a long-term human-robot presence on the moon and Mars in the late 20th century.
Why the moon? Nelson says something. The goal is Mars. We can learn how to survive on the moon if we only have to be three or four days away from Earth. We go back to the moon, we learn how to live there, and we create habitats.
The south pole of the moon will be the site of a probe in 2023 to find out how much water there is. If there is water, we have rocket fuel, hydrogen and oxygen.
The US was spurred to the moon by the Soviet Union, which put the first satellite in space and the first person in space.
China is the principal rival of Biden's presidency, and space is no exception. China is the only country to have landed a rover on Mars.
Is a new space race under way and if so, is it a good thing? Nelson agreed to the space race. I think they want to bring a sample from Mars earlier than us. I think they want to land on the moon before we do. America needs to pay attention to the facts.
Is that a good thing? Not really. If they were partners with Russia since 1975, it would be a better thing.
The leaders of the American and Russian space agencies had a good relationship during the cold war, can Nelson establish a similar relationship with 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 people to tango. The two of us are not interested in doing the tango.
They are good but secretive. They are not collaborative. They are not transparent.
The 12 people who walked on the moon were all white American men. Nelson makes a point of saying that Artemis will be the first woman and first person of colour on the moon. A fictional character called Callie Rodriguez is the subject of a graphic novel produced by Nasa.
What impact would that moment have on girls and children of colour? Look what female and minority astronauts have already done. Little girls dream dreams that they didn't think possible before. Same thing with minorities.
Many of the headlines are taken by white men such as Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk. Nelson doesn't seem upset about the thunder being stolen.
They are spending their money on technology. They are opening up press attention and excitement by American people and then, when you add that to the Nasa programme, it's all the more exciting.
A lunar lander that can carry 100 tons of cargo is being developed by Musk. Enough to start building a moon base? I hope so, but it hasn't flown. The first test flight of the Space Launch System, a rocket that will carry astronauts to the moon, is still on schedule despite a legal challenge by Blue Origin.
Nelson attended the University of Florida, Yale and the University of Virginia Law School and served in the army. He went into politics after practicing law, first in the Florida state legislature and then in the US Congress.
In 1986 he went from the swamp to the stars on the space shuttle Columbia, and conducted 12 medical experiments, including the first American stress test in space. Just 10 days after he landed, another shuttle, Challenger, exploded, killing all seven crew members.
Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 command module pilot, once described Earth as a very shiny blue, white, and black thing. William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in Star Trek, became the oldest person in space when he rode on a Blue Origin rocket in October.
Nelson has vivid memories of seeing Earth. It is beautiful. It is very bright. It is not suspended. It looks fragile despite being at home. I wanted to be a better steward of our planet when I returned, and that experience informed a lot of my public life.
When I went into space, I became more of an environmentalist, and that has led to 44 years of public service.
When I looked at the Earth every 90 minutes, I didn't see racial divisions or religious divisions, and I didn't see political divisions, the things that bedevil us here on the face of it. I saw that we were all citizens of planet Earth and that informed my public service as well.
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 says that the agency is planning to set up a mission control for climate change.
The public will be able to access it virtually. We will encourage state and local governments to access the data and make it easy for everyone to have an informed decision.
Nelson believes there has been a shift in public opinion on the issue. Ted Cruz was the first to call him when the news of his nomination for Nasa was leaked, and he notes that the Republican senator was an out and out climate denier.
Unexplained flying objects have gone mainstream in Washington. Intelligence officials do not believe aliens are responsible for dozens of accounts of unexplained aerial phenomena, but they cannot fully explain what is.
Nelson says that you have seen those films now that they are public. 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.
Is there life in the universe? We are searching for that answer and it is clear that I do. How can I limit a universe that is so big that I can't see how big it is, where we are in a galaxy with billions of stars and there are billions more if not trillions of galaxies, and the universe is expanding?
He says that like people who tried to limit Galileo that the Earth didn't revolved around the sun, everything revolved around the Earth. You get the drift.
It has long been the stuff of science fiction what the first contact with an alien civilization would mean. Politicians take it seriously. Gorbachev recalled that Reagan asked him what to do if the United States were attacked by someone from outer space. Would you help us? I said, "No doubt about it." He said, "We too." That is interesting.
Nelson, who became the secretary of space, must be hoping that China's president feels the same way about saving the planet.
