President Donald Trump says we’re going to Mars, but don’t start packing your bags just yet. There are a lot of reasons to doubt that his plans will get us to the Red Planet, and he may even put us further behind schedule.
In his inaugural address Monday, Trump said the country would “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars” and “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
Almost everything that Trump has said and done indicates that a trip to Mars is about as likely to happen as Trump’s broken first-term promise to repeal Obamacare.
It’s an ambitious goal and one of the few he’s laid out for his second term that has broad support. In a 2023 poll, 57% of Americans favored sending astronauts to Mars, making it much more popular than Trump’s pardons for Jan. 6 participants, attempt to overturn birthright citizenship and proposal for broad-based tariffs on foreign goods, all of which majorities oppose.
But other than that single sentence, almost everything Trump has said and done indicates that a trip to Mars is about as likely to happen as Trump’s broken first-term promises to repeal Obamacare, make Mexico pay for a border wall and guarantee six weeks of paid family leave.
In that term, Trump also said America would go to Mars, signing legislation that directed NASA to plan a mission that would launch in 2033. But he was so blasé about his own proposal that he apparently forgot about it when holding a video chat with an astronaut that same year, then got annoyed when she noted that the Mars landing wouldn’t happen before he left office.
A trip to Mars was included in the 2024 Republican platform, which said only that the U.S. would “create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit, send American Astronauts back to the Moon, and onward to Mars.” (To be fair, the Democratic platform also included only one sentence, noting that NASA would send Americans “back to the moon and to Mars.”) But Mars does not appear in the Trump campaign’s Agenda 47 list of core promises or the detailed Project 2025 proposal from conservative groups, which doesn’t even have a section on NASA.
Even in these abbreviated references, you might notice a subtle change that could prove consequential. All of them reference America going back to the moon for the first time since 1972 and then to Mars. But Trump skipped past the moon. A clue to the reason for that omission comes from billionaire SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who posted on X in December that “we’re going straight to Mars” and called a moon mission “a distraction.”
NASA hasn’t seen it that way. Its goal has long been to use the planned Artemis moon missions as a first step toward going to Mars, testing the larger crewed spaceships on a trip that would take only days instead of the months it would take to get to Mars — kind of like taking the kids to a nearby Six Flags to see if they’re ready to go to Disney World.
But it sounds like Trump is following Musk’s lead. He has nominated billionaire Jared Isaacman, who has paid for two private trips to space on SpaceX rockets and is close with Musk, to lead NASA. And he skipped over a career official who has defended the Artemis program when appointing an acting administrator to serve until Isaacman can be confirmed. Some NASA observers think Trump will cancel the moon missions.
It’s hard to find the logic in any of this. The directive to return to the moon before going to Mars literally came from Trump himself in his first term. If Trump doesn’t cancel it, NASA is planning to send a crewed spaceship on a flyby of the moon in 2026 and land on the moon in 2027. Unlike John F. Kennedy, whose moon shot was finally achieved under his one-time opponent, Richard Nixon, Trump could celebrate his own moon mission while still serving as president.
Trump clearly wants some kind of a space triumph. He created the Space Force and said he wanted to go to Mars by the end of his first term. He said at a rally with Musk in October that America would go to Mars before the end of his second term, though he didn’t specify whether that meant an unmanned spacecraft or actual American space boots on the ground.
He’s not the first president to propose going to Mars. President George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush both proposed sending astronauts to the Red Planet. But while popular, the idea often founders because it’s so costly. A 2016 estimate put the figure at half a trillion dollars. The price has only gone up since then, and we still don’t have the technology to keep astronauts alive on such a long ride or develop the fuel for a return trip.
Because missions to Mars can only happen when the two planets are relatively close to each other, there’s basically only one chance to send a spaceship there during Trump’s second term, which would be in late 2026, which is far too soon given the technological limitations we’re already up against.
To sum it all up: Trump appears ready to upend years of planning for a moon mission that he proposed in favor of a dramatic new plan to go to Mars that has not been fleshed out in any way, likely as a favor to a billionaire friend who would personally benefit if NASA awarded a contract worth hundreds of billions of dollars to his company and on behalf of a promise that requires developing and launching unproven technology in the next two years. That’s not gonna happen.
This is a moon shot proposal that won’t take us back to the moon, and likely won’t take us to Mars, either.
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