Is a Mars mission going to happen? As soon as Mexico pays for the border wall. [View all]
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.”
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.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-elon-musk-mars-plan-rcna188973
When pigs fly.
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