A partial transcript from Episode 21 of THE ART MOVEMENT. Scroll down to listen to the full radio show.

Gregory Porter actually made history last week by singing a special rendition of “America the Beautiful” as part of the live coverage of NASA’s historic Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission.

The performance was broadcast from his home in California and this made Porter the very first ever recording artist to be invited by NASA to perform a Mars mission launch. So that’s pretty cool, Gregory. We at THE ART MOVEMENT speak your name and we salute you.

By the way, just in case you are as interested and fascinated with space exploration as I am, the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover was launched on the 30th of July and it’s expected to touch down on Mars on the 18th of February. And the official goal of the mission is to search the Red Planet for signs of ancient life and collect samples to send back to Earth.

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “Perseverance is going to make discoveries that cause us to rethink our questions about what Mars was like and how we understand it today.”

So, in short, with the launch of this mission, NASA is essentially asking one simple question: was there life on Mars?