FPI / January 25, 2025
Geostrategy-Direct
By Richard Fisher
On Jan. 20, 2025 a reelected President Donald J. Trump began his peaceful “revolution of common sense,” inaugural address featuring national optimism and purpose.
But Trump also laid down a momentous challenge to Americans, allies and enemies alike with the potential to upend the global balance of power with his declaration, “And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
At first glance, it seems like Trump is aligning with his chief billionaire friend and campaign funder Elon Musk, founder and leader of the innovative SpaceX Corporation, who since 2016 has been explaining how and why he will colonize Mars.
But it’s not that simple, the reality is that Trump has almost singularly revived an expansive American ambition in space, repudiating the space defeatism of his predecessor President Barack Obama, who on April 15, 2010 publicly cancelled the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) manned Moon Constellation Program of his predecessor President George W. Bush.
In March 2018 Trump announced the formation of the most recent U.S. military service, the United States Space Force, to actively support and defend U.S. security interests in space.
Then in May 2019 Trump posted on the former Twitter: “Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!”
During a Sept. 20, 2019 meeting at the White House with Australian Prime Minister Morrison, Trump explained the relationship between going to the Moon and Mars:
“And, you know, we’re doing — we’re doing — we’re going to Mars. We’re stopping at the moon. The moon is actually a launching pad. That’s why we’re stopping at the moon. I said, “Hey, we’ve done the moon. That’s not so exciting.” They said, “No, sir. It’s a launching pad for Mars.” So we’ll be doing the Moon. But we’ll really be doing Mars. And we’ll be — we’re making tremendous progress.”
But it a different Donald Trump who begins his second term as President, a man who had to overcome the lawfare of the Democrat Party, aligned with allies in the intelligence community and the compliant media to stage impeachments while in office, lawsuits while out of office, and then manage to survive two assassination attempts.
Trump invokes the U.S. presidents from early in the last century, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, to geographically shore up American power in its own hemisphere by seek to reassert control over the Panama Canal, and then to control Greenland, all to better defend against Chinese and Russian strategic military ambitions.
Trump promises a revival of “peace through strength” that portends massive increases in U.S. military spending, and his renewed commitment to putting American on Mars will also require significant budget increases for NASA and commitments to key goals.
As Trump has noted, a decision to put American on Mars will require that the United States first secure U.S. and allied access to the Moon.
With the next NASA attempt to put American back on the Moon delayed to 2027, this is too close to China’s ambition to begin putting Chinese on the Moon in 2029 or 2030.
Significant investments will be required in the two main private space companies that promise to lower the cost of reaching the Moon with their reusable space launch vehicles (SLV), SpaceX and the Blue Origin Corporation led by billionaire Jeff Bezos.
But the current SLV paradigm for both companies now depends on chemical propulsion, which requires multiple and high risk refuelings in Low Earth Orbit, in lunar orbit and eventually in Mars orbit.
While the chemically-propelled SpaceX Starship and the Blue Origin New Glenn SLVs may be the first to transport Americans to Mars, there will be an urgent requirement to develop nuclear energy space propulsion, which can vastly reduce the time and expense required to reach Mars, in order to achieve an economically affordable and sustainable American presence.
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