If history is any guide, President-elect Donald Trump will be placing a phone call to the moon sometime within the next four years. That’s the way it worked in 1969, when Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first pressed human bootprints into the Sea of Tranquility and NASA patched a call from President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office to the astronauts on the lunar surface. According to the space agency’s current flight manifest, the Artemis II mission will carry a crew of four on a flyby around the far side of the moon in November of 2025. Then, if everything goes as scheduled, as early as 2026, Artemis III will follow, aiming for the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.
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When it comes to space exploration, “I would think that this next [Trump] Administration is going to be a continuation of the success in the first administration,” says Sean O’Keefe, NASA administrator from 2001 to 2005 and now a professor of public administration at Syracuse University. “[Trump] prides himself on being very unpredictable, so I wouldn’t put certainty on this, but all signs point in that direction.”
As well they might. Fresh off a thumping win, Trump may have no shortage of ideological detractors, but not a lot of them come from the space sector. His first administration inherited a crewed space program that was largely adrift and took key steps to set it to rights. During the presidency of George W. Bush, NASA had its cap set for a return to the moon under the Constellation program. President Barack Obama pulled the plug on Constellation, replacing lunar exploration with a head-scratching plan to use a robotic spacecraft to find and tow a 25-ft., 500-ton asteroid to the vicinity of the moon and send astronauts out to land on that instead. The space shuttles, meantime, were retired in 2011, reducing American astronauts to thumbing rides to the International Space Station aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft—at over $90 million a seat. In 2014, NASA reached agreements with SpaceX and Boeing—paying them $2.6 billion and $4.2 billion respectively—to design and build commercial spacecraft that would once again have astronauts flying from American soil. The companies agreed to have the ships ready for flight certification by 2017—a target that came and went without a finished product rolling out of either factory, much less leaving the launch pad.
Under Trump, the space agency benefited from more-generous funding. Its total budget was boosted 10% to $22.63 billion by the end of his first four years, up from $20.90 billion at the beginning.
This helped fund a few key initiatives. At the end of Trump’s first year in office—on Dec. 11, 2017—he signed a policy directive canceling the asteroid mission and putting crewed moon exploration back on the itinerary. Then things progressed further on May 30, 2020, when the first SpaceX Crew Dragon lifted off, carrying astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station; that program might have had its origins in the Obama Administration, but it was Trump’s NASA—under Trump-appointed administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former U.S. Representative—that saw it across the finish line.
The government’s space portfolio grew bigger still on Dec. 20, 2019, when Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which established the Space Force—the first new branch of the U.S. armed forces in 73 years. The Space Force’s remit is not just to protect U.S. assets, like spy satellites, from attacks by hostile nations; it is also to prepare the nation for the possibility that space might one day become a war-fighting domain. Most of the work the Space Force does was already being performed by the Air Force, but if Pentagon history teaches us anything, it’s that once the funding and hiring spigots open, they don’t close very easily. At its outset, in 2019, the Space Force was appropriated just $40 million in start-up funding. Under President Joe Biden, its 2024 budget ballooned to $29 billion. That may be a tiny fraction of the Defense Department’s total budget of $849.8 billion that year, but it still represents a 725-fold increase in just five years. In August, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told Defense News that that figure would have to grow further still.
“That budget is going to need to double or triple over time to be able to fund the things we’re actually going to need to have,” he said. Some of those necessary assets include satellite constellations that can provide redundancy in the event of an attack, and anti-jamming capabilities to harden a spacecraft against an enemy nation’s electromagnetic sabotage. “Somebody’s going to have to make some decisions about whether to give us a bigger budget overall for this or do some internal trades.”
“You could predict this like swallows to Capistrano,” says O’Keefe. The Space Force might just be picking up work the Air Force is already doing, he argues, but the fact that it’s the Space Force’s number one priority “as opposed to the number two, five, or ten for the Air Force,” makes ambitious projects and bigger budget requests inevitable.
Neither Trump nor Vice President Kamala Harris made much mention of space on the campaign trail, yet it is all but assured that changes are coming—for NASA if not for the Space Force—starting at the top. The space agency’s current administrator, Bill Nelson, is a Florida Democrat who served for 18 years in the U.S. Senate and 12 years in the House of Representatives, chairing the subcommittees on science and space in both chambers. He lost his bid for a fourth senate term in 2018, during Trump’s first term, and was tapped as NASA boss by then-incoming President Joe Biden, in 2021. As a political appointee, he is expected to step aside—as Trump appointee Bridenstine did when Biden took office and as Obama appointee Charles Bolden did at the beginning of Trump’s first term—rather than waiting to be pink-slipped on inauguration day.
Trump is moving quickly to fill vacancies—or at least float names—for cabinet-level posts and West Wing positions, including campaign co-chair Susie Wiles as chief of staff; former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) as a possible pick for Secretary of State. No name for NASA has been mentioned yet. But with the Artemis lunar program still finding its footing, the 2026 target for a crewed lunar landing looming, and the cost of a single launch of the Space Launch System moon rocket coming in at $2 billion, the betting among many is that the choice will come from industry as opposed to government. That was the direction then-president George H.W. Bush went when he tapped Daniel Goldin, who was vice president and general manager of the TRW Space and Technology Group in Redondo Beach, Calif., to lead the space agency through a streamlining and quality-control initiative he dubbed “better-faster-cheaper.”
“There’s no guarantee it’ll come from industry this time,” says Howard McCurdy, space policy expert and professor emeritus in public affairs at American University. “But what you need is someone who understands management finance. That tends to be the echo you hear through a presidential administration when you have a change of party.”
Of course, one of the space sector’s most conspicuous figures is already a part of the Trump camp—in the person of Elon Musk. The U.S. government and Musk’s SpaceX are already awfully cozy, however—what with the company’s regular cargo and crew flights to the space station, its increasing role launching Department of Defense payloads, and the selection of SpaceX’s Starship rocket to serve as the Artemis lunar landing vehicle. While not directly related to space, on Nov. 12, Trump announced that Musk would co-lead a new federal agency—Department of Government Efficiency—responsible for regulating federal spending.
Trump’s second term will also see NASA tending to uncrewed spacecraft that have already left the earthly nest, including the Perseverance Mars rover, which launched in 2020, during the first Trump term, and landed in 2021 after Biden arrived in the White House; the Juno probe, which has been orbiting Jupiter since July 4, 2016; and the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which launched Oct. 14, 2024 and will arrive at Jupiter in 2030, where it will make 49 close flybys of the planet’s ocean moon Europa.
Trump’s NASA will also continue the work the agency has been doing to develop ion propulsion spacecraft, which use not chemical engines to accelerate ships, but electrically charged xenon atoms; and solar sails, which accelerate spacecraft under the power of photons from the sun bouncing off a reflective sail, much the way earthly sails are propelled by wind.
“It’s amazing,” says McCurdy, “but folks are still getting off this rock using the same chemical propulsion Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard used. There’s a bunch of really viable alternatives out there.”
The irony for Trump is that a man who has three times run for president on his bona fides as a businessman will be counting mostly on the government—NASA and the Pentagon—to establish his big-ticket legacy in space. The space agency may rely on the commercial sector to build its rockets, but it’s still Washington that’s inking the contracts, cutting the checks, and making all that cosmic adventuring possible. “I’ll give you a quotation you heard a lot during the Apollo program,” says McCurdy. “‘Project Apollo proved that we could do communism better than the Russians.’”