Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and Jonathan McDowell, astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, discuss NASA's Vision, the benefits and disadvantages of manned versus robotic missions, and whether we should be spending money on space-related projects instead of addressing needs here on earth.
Neil deGrasse Tyson was born and raised in New York City where he was educated in the public schools clear through his graduation from the Bronx High School of Science. Tyson went on to earn his BA in Physics from Harvard and his PhD in Astrophysics from Columbia.
Jonathan McDowell is an astrophysicist with the Science Data Systems Planning Group, in the Chandra X-Ray Center. He also writes a monthly column for *Sky and Telescope Magazine* and a weekly email-distributed newsletter, Jonathan's Space Report . McDowell's first astronomy job came when he left high school and worked for six months at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. After a math degree at Churchill College, Cambridge and a summer job at Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, McDowell began a Ph.D. at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge. He came to CFA in 1988 as a postdoc, moved to Huntsville, Alabama in 1991 but came back to Cambridge in 1992.