With his 100th day in office fast approaching and no major legislative achievements to show for it, Donald Trump is pulling out all the stops to get results. Last week, after Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin admitted that the administration’s timeline for reforming the tax code was “highly aggressive to the point of not realistic,” Trump called him out for his low-energy attitude. “We’re in very good shape on tax reform,” he said at an event in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “As soon as health care takes care of we are going to march very quickly. You’re going to watch. We’re going to surprise you. Right, Steve Mnuchin? Right?” Later, he reportedly ordered White House aides to accelerate their efforts to draft a tax plan so that he could have something to announce on Wednesday. The details of the plan, such as whether it would lose money, were not important, according to a person familiar with the order. The president just wanted his team to “get it done.”
Now, Trump appears to be applying his signature management style to the space program, too. On Monday morning, in between tweeting about building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and issuing vague threats about Obamacare, the president placed an inter-orbital call to NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson to congratulate her on setting a record for time spent in space. Flanked by his daughter-turned-adviser Ivanka Trump and astronaut Kate Rubins, Trump engaged Whitson in some light banter about how astronauts drink recycled urine (“Better you than me,” Trump said) before pushing her on when NASA could actually bring people to Mars.
“Tell me,” he asked. “For Mars, what do you see a timing for actually sending people to Mars. Is there a schedule, and when do you see that happening?” NASA, Whitson informed the president, could go to Mars by the 2030s. “Unfortunately spaceflight takes a lot of time and money,” she said. “Getting there will require some international cooperation, a planet-wide approach in order to make it successful just because it is a very expensive endeavor.”
That is apparently not fast enough for Trump, whose proposed 2018 budget cuts funding for NASA by about 1 percent. “Well, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my second term,” he responded. “So we’ll have to speed that up a little bit, okay?”
As with most things Trump says, it’s hard to know whether to take him literally, seriously, or none of the above. As Whitson noted, NASA is still years away from being ready to launch a manned mission to Mars. The agency would need a substantial budget increase to get humans to Mars by 2021, at the end of Trump’s first term in office. NASA’s Space Launch System, the enormous rocket the agency is planning to use to get to Mars one day, is scheduled to fly for the first time in fall 2018, in what may or may not be an unmanned mission on a trip around the moon (although that trip is likely to be delayed).
Presidential decrees, public excitement, and political willpower go a long way, but there’s plenty of reasons to doubt that Trump can kickstart NASA the same way that President Kennedy did in the 1960s. For one, the technical challenges involved in a round-trip ticket to Mars would involve about a year in space—a significant medical challenge that would involve exposing astronauts to high levels of radiation. For another, NASA was already working working toward a moon landing when Kennedy said “we choose to go to the moon,” he had already been told that it was possible by 1967. At present, however, NASA doesn’t seem to have much of a plan beyond its stated goal of sending people to Mars by 2030.
While NASA has faced criticism for lacking an achievable strategy get to Mars, the agency could get a boost by partnering with the private sector. Elon Musk, the C.E.O. of Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX, has said he hopes to begin sending the first manned missions to Mars as soon as 2024, though Musk—who is no stranger to setting ambitious goals for SpaceX and then coming up short—has called his own estimate “optimistic”. Blue Origin, the private spaceflight start-up bankrolled by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos also has its sights set on the Red Planet, though it is hoping to begin colonizing the Moon first.
