Although inflation, the border crisis, and foreign wars are rightly the issues of top concern for voters in November’s presidential election, the stakes are also high for the future of the American space program.
In a post on X last week, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk stated his belief that “unless there is significant government reform, laws & regulations will keep getting worse every year until every great endeavor, from high-speed rail between our cities to making life multiplanetary, is effectively illegal.”
“Trump supports a government efficiency commission to allow great things to be done, Kamala does not,” Musk added. “We will never reach Mars if Kamala wins.”
Musk has repeatedly insisted that, with the right investment and focus on innovation, the United States could land a man on Mars before the decade is out. He specifically believes that if planned unmanned missions to Mars in two years go well, “the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years.”
After decades of glaring mismanagement from the White House and government bureaucrats, Musk deserves credit for revitalizing the American space program and once again looking to push the boundaries of human knowledge and exploration. But as he rightly observes, making Mankind an interplanetary species will still depend on the government not getting in the way.
The moon landing in 1969 was perhaps the greatest human scientific achievement in history. In subsequent decades, NASA’s Space Shuttle program and leadership in developing the International Space Station (ISS) kept the United States on the cutting edge of space exploration.
Since the early 2000s, however, things have largely stalled.
In January 2004, the Bush administration requested that NASA develop a new crewed space vehicle. The Space Shuttle was scheduled for decommissioning in 2010, and America needed a replacement vehicle. NASA ultimately came up with the Constellation Program, which was supposed to ensure Americans could still access the ISS and put them on a path to returning to the moon in early 2020.
However, in President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget request for NASA, he recommended the Constellation Program be eliminated. NBC News reported that the decision killed “a five-year, $9 billion effort to build new Orion spacecraft and Ares rockets.”
A year later, the Space Shuttle was finally retired, and American astronauts were forced to rely on Russian rockets to travel to the ISS. Instead of using Constellation, Obama recommended a strategy whereby commercial companies would take over low-earth missions while NASA focused on a manned Mars mission.
Obama reassured Americans that he was not abandoning space and was refocusing the nation toward a future Mars mission. However, according to space policy expert Casey Drier, going to Mars “was such a big problem. The money was so inadequate that it became almost worse than nothing…They said they were going to Mars but contributed almost nothing to that effort.”
Meanwhile, the first manned commercial rocket to successfully reach the ISS wouldn’t come until 2020 with the SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Demo-2 launch.
After taking office, Donald Trump broke this space malaise almost immediately. According to MIT Technology Review, “On December 11, 2017, Trump issued Space Policy Directive 1, which officially called for NASA to begin work on a human exploration program that would return astronauts to the surface of the moon.” Newly appointed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine stated that the moon was a “proving ground” for “deep space missions” and an eventual Mars mission.
Equally consequential, on May 24, 2018, Trump issued “Space Policy Directive-2, Streamlining Regulations on Commercial Use of Space.” This directive empowered scientists to “cut through” piles of red tape and regulations impeding commercial spaceflight development. As the MIT Technology Review states, “The Trump administration has set things into turbo-drive, resulting in a flurry of new activities and opportunities for the commercial sector.”
On June 18th of that year, Trump also announced the reformation of the National Space Council to ensure America’s space policy wouldn’t stagnate again. Several months later, he formally established a United States Space Command, formally known as the Space Force. Until that point, space defense was left under the purview of the Air Force but lacked funding and strategic focus.
Trump’s space program was so successful that the Biden administration has largely left the overall organizational framework untouched. After taking office in 2021, Biden announced he would keep the reformed National Space Council and Trump’s ambitious space exploration timetable. Though liberals maligned the Space Force for years, Biden eventually applauded its creation.
However, while the Biden-Harris administration kept Trump’s framework, it has lacked the vision and ambition to drive the American space program forward and has bogged down companies like SpaceX in endless red tape. Following a recent Federal Aviation Administration decision that grounded most SpaceX rockets until late November, SpaceX stated in a lengthy blog post, “It takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware. This should never happen and directly threatens America’s position as the leader in space.”
The FAA’s justification for the delay was “environmental analysis,” which SpaceX called “absurd.”
Should Kamala Harris win and continue the policies of the Biden administration, America’s emerging space horizon could be eclipsed indefinitely by red tape and bloated bureaucracy. A second Trump term, meanwhile, could be humanity’s ticket to Mars.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
