♪ Christiane: Hello everyone and welcome to Amanpour and Company.

Here is what is coming up.

>> This verdict is for all women.

This is not about me.

Christiane: It is not about the money.

E. Jean Carroll says she has gotten her life back after a jury finds Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming her.

I ask a New Yorker magazine writer at large what this moment means for the #MeToo movement.

Also ahead -- >> Tight election race in Turkey after two decades of power.

Will it be the country's cost-of-living crisis that finally proves President Erdogan's undoing.

I ask politicians on both sides of the aisle.

>> We are in this new era of space.

This is the dawn of commercial space in a meaningful way.

Christiane: Interstellar gold rush.

Walter Isaacson asks an author about his new book, the chance commercialization of space: "When the Heavens Went on Sale."

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Thank you.

Christiane: Welcome to the program, everyone.

I am Christiane Amanpour in London.

It took a jury just a few hours to reach a unanimous verdict, but the effects can last decades.

E. Jean Carroll has been awarded $5 million, but even more importantly for her and all other victims, a jury believed her case that the former President Donald Trump sexually abused and defamed her more than 25 years ago.

At nearly 80 years old, Carroll never thought she would see the day.

>> I am really sort of taking in the moment and the overwhelming flood of a lot of hate.

That is part of it, but an overwhelming amount of relief and joy and feeling of at last, and the surge.

There is sort of a feeling of victory that had last somebody has held him accountable.

Christiane: Indeed, and in court, Trump in typical fashion says he is the real victim.

Take a listen.

>> The verdict is a disgrace and continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.

Christiane: Whether this impacts Trump's political prospects remains to be seen.

I do not think he can get elected, says prominent Republican Senator John Cornyn, but others came to his defense.

Is this a sequel to Trump's famous suppose that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still not lose voters?

This decision is about much more than politics, it is about women's rights to be heard and believed and for abusers to finally be held to account.

Rebecca Traister is a writer for New York magazine the Outlet who first broke the story.

You have also written about the consequence of this case, so let me just ask you, beyond politics what is your reaction to this result?

>> Well, it is one of those moments where the historic view of how long this kind of progress takes to make it really comes into view, because we go back to the excess Hollywood tape where Trump was caught it weeks before the 2016 election bragging about grabbing women against their will and how when you are a celebrity they will let you do it, and there was a lot of thought dead, some Republicans distance themselves.

There were thought that that could be an end to his presidential prospect.

Two women came forward with their stories in the New York Times and elsewhere, and yet he was elected president, and there was this sense of defeat, and it was a real defeat with incredibly important political consequences, and yet that was not the end of the story.

When it came to this question of legal, medical, social, civic consequences, alleging sexual assault and harassment.

In part, the fury of his election despite those admissions and charges resulted in the Women's March, which produced a way for political activism.

One year later there was the #MeToo movement, the reporting of sexual predation of Harvey Weinstein.

E. Jean Carroll in 2019 first told her story about having been assaulted in a department store dressing room, and now there was the creation of a special window in which those like E. Jean Carroll, for whom the statute of limitations had asked for criminal charges could file a civil case, which is what she did here.

And now in 2023 it is the first instance of Trump being held legally accountable, and I think that is an incredible story about how arduous and how long these things sometimes take.

Christiane: She referred to the new law in New York asked not to long ago that enabled her to bring this civil suit.

What do you think that will do in general?

How do people know that they have that time?

Because it is very important, she said this is a victory for all of those women who like my generation were the silent generation.

Talk about the silent generation.

>> E. Jean Carroll says it during her testimony: I was born in 1943.

Significant changes to law around both sexual assault and sexual harassment and the state's responsibility, the relationship of women and men to the state in terms of protection against sexual harassment and assault.

Those laws did not start changing until the 1970s, so part of what E. Jean Carroll is describing is a lifetime in the United States where she came of age before laws had even been reformed, revised--to better protect or punish those who committed sexual assault or harassment, so she came of age in an era before those legal changes had been made, and now she is sitting in this moment as an almost 80-year-old woman to see her story being taken as seriously -- in fact, more seriously than the word of a former president of the United States, so to have been born in part of what she called the silent generation, a generation where there was no confidence everything -- that raising your voice and telling a story of having been assaulted or in other cases harassed by a powerful figure, you know, the sense that would end badly for you, and that was a sense that persisted for her up until the 1990s when this assaulted place, and a friend advised her do not come forward and story about this powerful man at the time, a powerful businessman in New York City.

He will bury you, and she did not.

That is what she means by the silent generation, heart of an era in which there was no confidence in telling her story would end well for you.

And that lack of competence has persisted and this is an incredible instance in which she told the story, she told the story in a memoir, in court, she spoke several times during her testimony about how happy she was to get her day in court, and then the jury found in her favor.

It is a remarkable story of a lifetime in which many of these assumptions and laws have been changed.

Christiane: It will have a lasting impact and ramifications for many victims that fit her profile, especially-- and she said it earlier today in her media rounds that she has also changed the general perception of the victim.

Let's just listen to how she described it.

>> The old view of what the perfect victim looks like totally changed.

The old view of the perfect victim was a woman who always screamed, a woman who immediately reported, a woman whose life was supposed to fold up, and she is never supposed to experience happiness again.

That was just shut down with this verdict.

The death of a perfect victim has happened.

Christiane: That is actually a remarkable statement, and again, you have written about this, about her, the whole MeToo movement.

Would you agree with that the death of the perfect victim has ended now?

>> I think this was a real blow to the very narrow version of what a perfect victim might be.

I would love to say it is the death of the perfect victim stereotype, but those assumptions persist well beyond their sell by date.

She did do tremendous damage to this notion that in order to be believed, you had to be entirely shaped and marked by your experience of assault and trauma, and that anything that was more complex, more fundamentally human than that and validated her story, and here was this woman who was simultaneously a lot of things, brash, competent, a professional who did not initially tell her story, who did not scream, who also expressed in her testimony described her trauma not being able to be in a relationship after her experience with Donald Trump, who talked about all kinds of messy and contradictory things and was believed, because messy and contradictory is part of being a full human and part of the fight for gender equality is to establish people who are not just white men are also fully human and therefore complicated, messy, and full of contradictions.

Christiane: You mentioned it before, the famous tape in which he said he could grab women's private parts and etc.

And he doubled down in his deposition in which E. Jean Carroll's lawyer questioned him.

Donald Trump was given the opportunity to defend himself in this case, it will talk about what he did and did not do, but there was questioning by the lawyer about this regular issue and double play them.

>> Historically that is true with stars.

>> True with stars that they can grab women by the [beep].

>> If you look over the last one million years, that has been largely true.

Unfortunately or fortunately.

>> You consider yourself to be a star?

>> I think you can say that, yeah.

Christiane: This then plays both ways.

The first time it was uttered and everyone thought that was going to end his bid for the presidency, it did not, paradoxically this time it seems to have been a big part of the evidence against him.

>> I mean, it is a fascinating thing, because Donald Trump is not wrong in that deposition that this is behavior that has been broadly permissible and not even considered legally problematic up until very recently.

He is certainly not the first president who has grabbed people against their will, and it nonetheless became president.

But, part of what the fight in this period is is to solidify these laws that are supposed to reform those attitudes, that are supposed to discourage them, punish that kind of behavior when it takes place, and that it is supposed to better protect women and give them equal citizenship and representation under the law and in civic and public and private and social contexts, so he is reflecting attitudes that as he says have been the norm over generations, but part of the work that we are in the midst of right now is altering those attitudes.

So in this instance and his were light on that doubling down as his defense did not hold water and in fact, probably helped to sink him, because there was a jury that said those millions of years of that behavior are not OK, and you are going to be held Lee accountable in this case for having behaved that way.

Christiane: And there are allegedly other women who have similar cases that they may or may not bring, that they have been raised publicly in the media, and he, the former president, has a set -- said, he said he will appeal, but using Carroll's lawyer, said he might appeal it.

is his right, but he does not have any grounds.

He will not win.

I am wondering what you think that is based on, partly his own words and that testimony she suggested.

>> Yes, I mean, I think the strength of this victory is undeniable.

There can be no allegations here that this was some left wing -- he will make them, this is a witch hunt the greatest witch hunt in history, but this was a jury of New Yorkers, at least one of whom was reportedly a man who listens to conservative talk radio.

It was a majority male jury, and these people found in favor of E. Jean Carroll.

There is nothing for suspicious or ideological about the nature of this ruling.

He absolutely has the right to appeal, and I never want to predict the legal future.

Carroll's lawyers are right.

This was a federal case presided over by a judge, there was a jury that the information, deposition from Trump and testimony from Carroll and came to this finding within three hours, so I do not think there is much grounds to expect that he would prevail should he appeal.

Christiane: Rebecca, clearly the elephant in the room is the fact that this person is running again for the presidency.

It not only that, he has some 50% of the Republican vote right now.

He is way ahead of his nearest challenger who is not even yet declared, Ron DeSantis, and it is really interesting, and had not plucked it-- the jury was majority men, but he is running for election again.

And I wonder what you think this time what effect that might have a second time around, given that women's vote has proven to be so powerful particularly after the Supreme Court ruling rejecting Roe v. Wade and all of those kinds of rulings.

>> Yeah, it is a fascinating question.

I cannot predict the future.

Versions of the story, people coming forward with detailed accounts of Trump having assaulted them, Trump himself admitting and bragging about grabbing women against their will, all of that was public before his first election.

A majority of Americans did not vote for him.

He won to the electoral college, that he won.

There are people who vote for Donald Trump many of whom believe these attitudes, the kinds of things and behaviors, what he has described as having persisted for millions of years are the way that the world should be, that men should have certain abilities, powerful men should have certain abilities to behave in ways toward women and other bodies in general, and they like that about him, and they liked that he is direct about that, so let's not pretend that everybody is put off by this.

There was a reason this is such a long fight.

People want the world to remain that way, but we have also had his presidency now, which was not true in 2016, and we can see the political and legal ramifications of him having been in power.

You know, his Supreme Court in part they just made the decision about pregnant people's bodies, access to reproductive health care, there are connections there.

The idea that you should treat certain kinds of bodies in certain restrictive and abusive ways is now very horrifyingly evident how that can work itself out in terms of policy and law, so that might change the calculation.

Christiane: There is another elephant in the room, and with all disclosure, we want to mention what many others are talking about, and that is the Trump town hall on CNN.

He has tweeted before this verdict they made me a deal I could not refuse.

Could you be the beginning of a new and vibrant CNN with no more fake news or could turn into a disaster for all.

CNN has said this is a legitimate inquiry into a legitimate presidential candidate who is way ahead of the others, and that he will be interviewed vigorously.

This is an extraordinary opportunity for him to be interviewed about precisely what we are talking about on this particular moment or what?

What do you think?

>> Well, I cannot predict how it is going to go.

I know that he is -- you listen to what he says, it could go terribly.

This is a showman who has shown a mastery in getting audiences to pay attention to him, and getting things like a town hall that all eyes will be on him.

It is a tremendous opportunity for him to show off his brand of aggressive masculinity.

Doing for the way he behaved on those debates where he pawed the ground and stood menacingly behind her, and that was a performance of old-style machismo that is very tied to his defense against Carroll.

He simultaneously wants to advertise himself as a man who has been wronged by these feminists and this left wing witch hunt, so he can put on the Donald Trump show of aggressive, unapologetic masculinity.

The question is how that will be handled journalistically by CNN and within the context of the town hall, and I do not know how that is going to go.

Christiane: Rebecca, thank you very much.

As you said, this was a victory for the MeToo movement and for feminism and for women and for all victims actually.

While Trump embodies illiberal democracy, in Turkey it is there President Erdogan who does the same.

Take a look at this photo with his then U.S. counterpart George W. Bush.

Elections on Sunday present Erdogan with the most serious challenge so far.

For the first time he enters an election trailing in the polls, but they are tightening.

With a cost-of-living crisis and anger still brewing over the response to the catastrophic earthquakes, Turkish voters will get a chance to vote for more of the same or for change.

In a moment, we will talk to a supporter of the main opposition candidate, but first a member of the central decision-making board of Erdogan's party.

We welcome you to the program from Istanbul.

Let me ask you, this is -- I mean, the first time that your leader, your party chairman, the president has entered this kind of race trailing.

How do you think it is going to go?

Is it really very tight?

Does he have to do a lot of work to win?

>> First of all, let me give you a big thank you to all of the media partners and volunteers who have been working day and night tirelessly.

Helping earthquake survivors and recently more on our campaign.

We are proud to be delivered what we promised five years ago, and people are giving the credit.

President Erdogan had 26 million votes in the last election.

We were hoping we would exceed this number and he will be elected again to this country as a president.

President Erdogan is making two or three rallies in last month coming across campaigning in 81 cities, and we are seeing people are giving their confidence to us again from a small community events to large rallies.

1.7 million in Istanbul on the Sunday, and it is clear evidence people are showing their support to us, and we are hoping resident Erdogan and that party will win in the first run.

Christiane: Of course you are hoping and you want a first round.

Many are talking about a second runoff.

20 years as a long time to be president, prime minister, president and to keep running the place.

In the midst of something that you just cannot spend, and that is hyperinflation, the plunging currency, falling living standards, and the corruption that President Erdogan addressed when he was forced to drink last year's earthquake.

People have said at have been quoted as saying we always hope for better standards of living, now we are being crushed.

85% inflation.

How does the president tell the people that if you vote me, you get something better?

>> Look, we are not immune to global economic challenges.

A global pandemic, the Russian Ukraine war, highly increasing energy prices impacted Turkey as much as it impacted U.K., U.S., United States, and Germany, but we were one of the countries that actually had the quickest recovery.

We have reached the highest tourism and export income in our history last year, and the inflation dropped 40% since October 2022, and it will continue to drop throughout this year.

And we will see single digits next year.

We are hoping we will see single digits.

And President Erdogan has achieved this before and that party, and we know people believe we can do this again.

Christiane: Well, you are having to persuade them, because obviously the proof is in the very close, tight polls, and him trailing at the moment, which is the first time this has happened during one of his elections.

Also, is this really a fair election?

The opposition has said, how can it be a level playing field when the president controls all of the media.

They are loyal to him and Reporters without Borders says 90% of Turkish media is controlled by the president and his allies.

How do you think that the opposition gets a look in?

>> First of all, I completely disagree with the claim.

That is not true.

Free media is free in Turkey as much as they are in the U.S. and the U.K.

If someone who comes to his temple can see different political parties are campaigning in the streets, and the atmosphere of election in Turkey is a festive Democratic atmosphere.

We have one of the highest presentation that shows the commitment the Turkish people have toward democracy and elections.

And also I would like to make sure this point is recorded.

And it comes to the economy and inflation, we have delivered some of the main projects that despite global challenges, we have the largest hydroelectric plant, solar power plant, nuclear power plant delivered in these last five years.

Maybe your other guests will, after me will not tell, but we created 2 million jobs in 2022.

Christiane: We will take that, but we know the number of journalists jailed in your country are 40 at the moment, and it is a pretty difficult situation for those other than those who are approved by the president.

Let's not argue about that, because that is a statistic.

>> If you allow me to correct that.

Those people you credit as journalists, most of them have never done journalism.

Christiane: They are still in jail.

>> For example, one of them actually killed the police.

He is not inside just because he is a journalist.

He committed a crime.

Journalism does not give people-- Christiane: Of course it does not give them the right to commit crimes.

I understand there is not a totally free and independent press there.

Let me ask you a final question.

We have had a back and forth.

Here's the thing, you have just said you hope the party will win on the first run.

The question is, will your party if it does not win on the first round except the results, and if it then does not win on the second round, will it accept the results?

>> Of course we will accept any result this nation tells us on the ballot box.

We have a very strong democracy.

At meetings, the rallies across Turkey and Istanbul, 1.7 million people participated, and this is the highest number of monthly history of Turkish political rallies.

It shows that we will be winning.

The party will have another five years to deliver projects.

Christiane: We will be watching closely.

Thank you very much for joining us.

Now, as I said we will turn to the deputy chairman of one of the opposition parties of the grand coalition that has banded together for this effort.

So, you just heard your opposition there talking about the economy that seems to be going better because of the intervention of the president.

What is the main platform that you will think is your path to overturning a 20 year reign?

>> Thank you for having me.

The problem in Turkey is really multidimensional, and we are obviously arguing on all of those platforms, but I am also the chairman of the economic policy unit, so I focus mostly on the economy, but Turkey does not have a good record in terms of human rights and democracy.

People are jailed or picked up from their homes just because they sent a simple tweet and so on and so forth, so people are intimidated constantly by the government.

People who support opposing parties are constantly under threat.

In this atmosphere it is hard to be up there and free election and whether the ballot boxes will be for themselves is a challenge one has to look to.

In terms of the biggest item, it is the economy.

Turkey is having very high inflation, it is true that because of the pandemic inflation was a worldwide phenomenon, but many countries, emerging markets had inflation that is about 1/5 of what Turkey had.

90% inflation we had in Turkey was Turkey's own doing, and the government had been fabricating numbers, so the inflation was actually much higher than what government statistic agencies said.

Going forward, we are actually facing a much more difficult era.

To Turkey is running a very high trait economic deficit, despite what your previous guest had said.

Turkey is exporting more but is importing a lot more than it used to, and Turkey is manipulating its currency by spending its reserves.

Write down Turkey's central banks are near negative $70 billion.

The fear is Turkey will run out of reserves.

If President Erdogan wins again and continues on this path of mismanagement and corruption, I am afraid Turkey will experience much worse than high inflation.

Christiane: And what -- I am sorry to interrupt you, but what gives you the belief in the hope then, and we do hear about people's economic pain obviously but after two decades and was so much of the state institutions at his disposal, including the press and the mass media, how do you think you can break through?

>> Obviously if we had free press and full democracy, President Erdogan would lose in a landslide.

Because he has control in the country and using the government's power to campaign.

He is making the race close, so the outcome of the election is quite uncertain.

There was a good chance our candidate will win, and there is a chance I am afraid still that we might lose, and that is what usually happens in these autocratic regimes.

You have to use the chance that you have.

In the unlikely outcome that we lose, I hope we do not go there, but the fight will continue.

This is not the end of things, and hopefully we will win.

Christiane: And you heard your opponent basically saying millions of new jobs have recently been created.

He just launched the largest warship, gas occurred, open Turkey's first nuclear power plant and is getting up from Russia.

Is that something that resonates with people that they will see him actually using the presidency to do those things that might benefit him?

>> Sure, but obviously when asked to make corrections in all of this.

If you compare it to the burden of the pandemic, all of these countries have created drops.

It is not surprising to see the economy bounce back.

Just before elections, President Erdogan announces the country has found new reserves of oil and gas, and they have done this and that.

That constantly happens, but people have caught up with those fabrications that most of these things in the long term do not turn out, but needless to say some of the stuff does influence people.

President Erdogan's success, he is pragmatic.

He is a good politician for the country but for his own personal interests, and he manages to change the focus from the economy to the security.

Despite what your previous guest had said, he is running on the security issue.

He is trying to say that, well, it may be the economy is not that good, for the safety of the country in the future and so on and so forth you have to support me.

He actually fabricates facts that try to put the opposition parties with the side of terrorists and so on and so forth, so he does build his campaign on top of a bunch of lies effectively.

Christiane: The politics of fear are employed all over the world, of course.

Can I ask you something though in terms of international policy of the coalition if you do, in fact, win?

One of the big issues is E.U.

membership that has been tabled.

What will the coalition do regarding better ties with the West if it wins.

>> Obviously Turkey has to do what is good for her and the future of the country.

Turkey should and will continue good relations with her neighbors, including Russia, but at the end of the date most of Turkey's interest is building a partnership with the West.

Europe is part of NATO and Turkey is a part of the European Union, the customs union, and most of Turkey's exports are to Europe, the European Union and so was the foundation of investments.

Turkey will make the most with our relationship with the West in a way that benefits Turkey and her long-term civic allies and partners, and in some ways obviously I am not a diplomat.

I am running on the side of the economy in a sense I am running for a position to run the economy.

I think it is fair to say that Turkey will go back to its factory settings after the election once we win.

Christiane: We will be watching this election.

It will be very interesting for a lot of reasons.

Now to space where the modern-day fight for the skies could turn science fiction into reality.

It is the tech boom that promises to take over as a new generation of entrepreneurs manage to navigate the wild West of Aerospace engineering and private companies compete in the race to commercialize space.

It is all chronicled in Ashlee Vance's new book.

He's joining Walter Isaacson to explain this new era of exploration.

Walter: Thank you, and Ashlee, welcome to the show.

>> Thank you so much.

Walter: Congratulations on this new book about all of the people getting into the private space industry in lower orbit.

It starts with Elon Musk and SpaceX doing its first three failed lunches, and finally a successful one.

You wrote a biography.

Tell me why you start with Musk since he is not the main character in the book?

>> Yeah, well, one of the big arguments I am trying to make is we are in this new era of space.

This is the dawn of commercial space in a really meaningful way and since the 1960s, that obviously was not the case.

This was a very government-backed slightly military driven enterprise, and if you rich people have tried in the past to make commercial rockets, and they had had some success, but nothing major.

In 2008 when SpaceX gets this Falcon One rocket, this privately funded rocket from this dot-com billionaire into orbit, I see this as this exciting incident in the moment.

It was not immediately clear this would kick off a huge commercial space race, and I think a lot of people look at what SpaceX had done, and as I argue in the book, a lot of people's imagination and passion and this pent-up interest in space that's been a dead-end over the decades.

Walter: This is about a bunch of companies people have not heard of, and they seem to be creating or trying to create an economy in low Earth orbit.

It seems like this new frontier.

What are they trying to create?

>> Another central argument in my book is that going to Mars and setting up an economy is fascinating.

People want to do something similar on the moon.

There is space tourism, if you take a step back the immediate action taking place right now is in low-earth orbit, the bit of space that is right above our head where thousands of satellites:, and the SpaceX is a major player in that space-- the major player, but there are now hundreds of rocket startups and satellite startups that are looking to build a type of competing shell around the earth, one data point from people.

From 1960 until 2020 we put up 2500 satellites into low Earth orbit.

That number doubled over the last two years to 5000.

It is expected to go from anywhere between 100,000 to 200,000 satellites.

Walter: Tell me what they are to do?

>> I do not think people realize what is going on.

There are a couple of buckets what is happening.

We have hundreds of imaging satellites.

One of the companies in my book is called planet labs.

They make these tiny, shoebox-sized satellites.

Take a picture of every spot on earth every day, multiple pictures, and that even the U.S. government, Russia, China as this capability.

The second major bucket is communications.

We see Space X, a company called One Web, and Amazon heading this direction to make a space Internet that is delivered from low-earth orbit.

The central premise with this is really -- it is twofold I suppose.

You connect the 3.5 billion people on earth that cannot be reached by fiber-optic cable, you bring them into the modern economy, and at the same time you create an always-on Internet for the first time that is just persistent and watching over the earth, and these are just the beginning steps of what people are gambling is a much bigger space economy in low-earth orbit.

Walter: You said something fascinating right now and it is in your book, the marshal of planet labs of the ability to take a picture of every single spot on earth every day.

Why could that be a really good economic business model?

>> Is fascinating.

It has kind of flown under the radar.

It is impossible not to make space puns as you go.

Imaging satellites, people would think of them as spy satellites, but that is not the case here.

These are satellites that are photographing the sum total of human activity taking place below us.

It could be something like literally counting every tree on planet Earth, their biomass, how much carbon dioxide they pull in.

This is something you could use to put actual tricks around things like carbon credits as we try to solve climate change.

Walter: Do they do it with infrared so you can say here are the people emitting carbon this day?

>> Absolutely, they do that.

They also do it for methane.

They have different sensors on the satellites.

One of their biggest customers is agriculture.

Farmers use headlights to look from space to see a much chlorophyll is in their crops and decide when to harvest them, how healthy their crops are, what their yield is going to be?

I think of it is this almost Google search engine for the earth sitting above us.

Walter: Could a company like Walmart say I want to know how many trucks are coming to Target every day, and I want to be able to calculate their exact supply chain?

>> Absolutely, you will have these satellites going over Walmart parking lots during back to school season and you have people in hedge funds counting cars in parking lots.

If they do the same thing... storage tanks.

There is this fascinating technique where these tanks have these lids that depress depending on how much oil is in them, and the satellites look at the angle of the shadow that gets produced from that to count how much oil is actually in these tanks.

Walter: How could it affect warfare?

We know it played a role in Ukraine.

>> This is something where in the past if North Korea was sending up a missile, you would be dependent on government images of this to spin it whichever way they so choose.

In the case of planets, this is a private company.

Anybody can hop on their website and find these images.

It is almost this independent layer of truth about what is happening.

In Ukraine, it is fascinating when we had Russia telling us they were not going to attack Ukraine.

We had hundreds of planet images of the Russian troops amassing in Belarus at the border, and we sort of knew exactly what was going to happen, and in the early days when Russia did move into Ukraine, the satellites provided Ukraine with intelligence they never would have had before on the Russian troop movements both during the day and at night.

Walter: We have had Senator Bill Nelson the NASA administrator on the show a couple of times, and he is really into public-private partnerships.

Tell me what NASA is doing to make use of these things?

>> The United States government has a more or less all-you-can-eat contract with planet, so they can use these environmental studies from somewhere like NASA, or they can use them for some sort of espionage activity distracting what is going on in the world, for yields on crops, so the United States is already using these images quite a bit.

The interesting thing to me is if you are a country that cannot afford to set up your own rockets or put up your own satellites where you have not made that investment, for the first time you can turn to a company like planets and be like on someone of a level playing field.

Walter: Your book is wonderfully readable, because it is so character driven.

I guess one of my favorites was General Pete Worden who comes from the traditional government background.

He was a general in the military.

Tell me his story and why he is one of the driving characters in your book.

>> I am glad you picked up on Pete.

We always think of Elon because he is out there in the public and has done so much to change this industry, but if there was a figure who was lurking in the back decades pushing things in this commercial space direction, it is Pete.

He is an astrophysicist with a PhD.

He became a general in the Air Force.

He was a major figure during the Star Wars missile defense shield.

He ran black ops operations.

Pete was sort of loved and hated for pushing up against his bosses, and he more or less got banished.

Walter: Bosses in the Pentagon.

He almost got fired, right?

Or got fired?

>> He did get fired.

He got fired by Rumsfeld for a black ops campaign gone wrong.

The Silicon Valley NASA Center, it is right by Google, it has had this decade-long influence on NASA and done a lot of pioneering sites, but the center was about to be closed down before Pete got there.

And he brought in just a ton of twentysomethings who thought very differently about space.

There were the ones who wanted to make cheap rockets, cheap satellites, and Pete gave them these resources to chase after the stuff.

NASA had an allergic reaction to what they were doing, the cap pursuing that, Planet Labs is a company that came out of NASA aims.

Walter: You say Planet Labs came out of NASA aims.

I think there is a Senator, Pete Worden, he was the evil Darth Vader, and he gets introduced to a man named Marshall and others who in my reading of your book are kind of hippies.

They are not doing this for military or business reasons.

How did that end up working out?

>> They could not be more opposite.

Marshall is the CEO.

He is as idealistic as it gets.

He spent his youth writing papers about not militarizing space, and he ends up with this bar with Pete.

He says, hi, I am Darth Vader.

Let's talk.

He did not bring in people that thought exactly like him or were doing exactly what he wanted.

He brought in people with new ideas and allowed them to flourish, and will is probably the prime example of that.

Walter: He had a phrase called responsive space.

What is that all about?

>> This is something Pete and the Department of Defense have dreamed about.

You can think of it is the precursor to Space Force.

There was this idea space could be another arm of the military is the same way we do things on land and in sea and in air, where you have a conflict and we sent a satellite at a moment's notice to wherever the conflict is taken place.

DOD and spent decades trying to do this and really could not figure out how to make these small, cheap rockets, cheap satellites capable of achieving their goals, and Pete was always pushing for this and then people like Elon and when it came pull this off.

Walter: The people in your book do not seem motivated by defense means or profit.

What is motivating them to do this?

>> The book has four different major stories, and I would argue the motivations of each character is a little bit different.

One of the things I try to point out in the book is that the space economy is happening, but it is not fully clear that it makes sense.

There are business cases to be had here, but we do not know how big they are going to be.

Walter: If you want to make money, this is not why you would be going into it.

>> The satellite side tends to have quite a bit of money, but it reminds me so much of the early days, 1996 with the consumer Internet.

We have this feeling that something big is happening, we will lay a ton of fiber-optic cables, we will build a bunch of data centers and see what happens.

Nobody would have predicted all of the businesses that have come out of that since.

With space, we are placing this huge bet that if you reduce the cost of getting to space and reduce the cost of the satellites, and a whole lot of new ideas flourish, but I argue in the book we do not know for sure.

Walter: We look at Richard Branson, he has Virgin Orbit, and it just went bankrupt.

What do you make of that?

>> I do not think people realize this is what I want to write the book.

There are hundreds of rocket start-ups all over the world, so there has been this massive investment in this economy already.

We are starting to see a bit of a pullback and separating the winners from the losers.

Right now in the book bucket lab are the only two major success stories as far as commercial record companies go.

I think we have seen the first wave of investment.

I think we learned a lot of lessons, and I do think we are going to see a second wave here soon of people trying to correct these early mistakes.

Walter: Tell me what you are worried about.

>> If we move 2500 satellites to 200,000 satellites in short order, there is very real risk of these things running into themselves in order.

There was a thing called the Kessler syndrome.

If a crash takes place you have this cascading issue of debris running into each other all the time, making it uninhabitable in low-earth orbit, and people might not care, because they say these are all futuristic things anyway, but it is not true.

GPS, which is this glue of modern society, would be disrupted.

Walter: Who regulates this?

>> There is some regulation.

The FAA and FCC do a lot of regulation about when the rockets can go up, what satellites they take and what does satellites can do, and are they going to compete with each other.

Once the satellite is in orbit, you would be surprised how little regulation there is.

It is kind of like put it up there and just go for it.

There is not even much regulation at all about what you have to do to dispose of the satellite.

As far as I know, New Zealand is the only country that has laws in place that say if you put something up in orbit, you are responsible for how it gets back at what happens to it and what it does well it is in space, so there is this layer of regulation or international bodies overseeing this, but I think commercial spaces moving so much faster than what happened before that they are having trouble keeping up.

It is a bit of a land grab at the moment.

Walter: You seemed to have had an enormous amount of fun.

Tell me the most fun you had.

>> I did have a lot of fun.

I went to some very exotic places.

My favorite trip I think was going to Ukraine before the war.

I was a kid who grew up in the 1980s, kind of a child of the Cold War, and I think I am the second Western reporter and the only one who brought a video camera into the old Soviet ICBM factories in Ukraine, and it was fascinating to see.

I went to the ICBM factories, the secret rocket testing sites in the forest.

It was fascinating for me to be in this place you never imagined you would even be allowed into growing up, and also a bit sad to see the state of it all.

It felt like it was frozen in the 1960s, and there was a tiny fraction of the number of people working there that used to work there, but nonetheless, that was probably my favorite trip.

Walter: Thank you so much for joining us.

Christiane: Finally, Pakistan is a country on edge sparked by the dramatic arrest of the former prime minister on corruption charges.

The last 24 hours have seen deadly clashes between his supporters and police.

I will talk about the stakes for this critically placed nation with Pakistan's former ambassador to the U.S. That is on tomorrow's show.

That is it for us.

If you want to find what is coming up for show every night, sign up for our newsletter at PBS.org/amanpour.

Thank you for watching, and goodbye from London.

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