Will Trump destroy Nasa? Its moonshot is a fantasy

At the end of May, all looked lost for Jared Isaacman. The billionaire tech entrepreneur, a self-funded astronaut who had been lined up to run Nasa, suddenly had his nomination pulled by Donald Trump. The President had just fallen out with Elon Musk, who had briefly been the “First Buddy”. Isaacman, whose trips into space had been via Musk’s company SpaceX, was collateral damage. Not only was Isaacman a “blue-blooded Democrat”, the President wrote in a fulminating social media post, it was also “inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon, who was in the Space Business, run Nasa”.

Yet the President seems to have overcome his misgivings, for Isaacman has been re-awarded the nomination. Today, Isaacman will face the final hurdle, a Senate hearing. Senators are likely to quiz the entrepreneur, who has never worked for Nasa, on his “Project Athena” report. In the report, which was leaked earlier this year, Isaacman called for Nasa to retire its main rocket programme, the Space Launch System, to ruthlessly cut down on bureaucracy, to rely more on private enterprise, and to redirect its energies towards the exploration of Mars. Democrats are likely to be sceptical of some elements of Project Athena. As for the Republicans, Isaacman has evidently been on a charm offensive: donating $1 million to pro-Trump organisations, and giving at least one MAGA influencer a trip in his private jet.

Isaacman has also made a more spiritual pitch. Not two months prior to the hearing, he spoke at a rally organised by Turning Point USA, the Right-wing advocacy group founded by the slain activist Charlie Kirk. “Having gone to space twice and looking back on our planet,” Isaacman told the crowd, “it’s hard not to be spiritual. But it was only recently that I was inspired to pick up the Bible again. I’ll tell you why — it’s because of Charlie, and it’s for Charlie.”

Isaacman’s remarks at the revivalist-like meeting raised alarm among some secular observers. Had Trump nominated a Bible-thumping Christian fundamentalist to lead America’s space agency? They need not be so concerned. Isaacman, as it happens, is Jewish, but said in 2021 that he was not religious. It is conceivable that Charlie Kirk may actually have meant something special to Isaacman, but it would not require extreme cynicism for one to imagine that there might have been an element of political expedience in his Turning Point comments.

If Isaacman gets the job, he’ll be up against a Trump administration determined to wreck many of America’s scientific powerhouses. It is currently busy eliminating the National Science Foundation and radical cuts to the budgets of the National Institute of Health and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Even worse, Trump has appointed RFK Jr., an opponent of modern medicine, to head the Department of Health of Human Services, turning the agency into a propaganda centre for anti-vaccine activists.

Trump said in his second inauguration speech that he wanted to send Americans to Mars. But far from proceeding with any such programme, Trump has turned his fire on Nasa, focusing his destructive efforts first and foremost on the agency’s most productive division, which is its Space Science Directorate. This is the part of Nasa that does the space telescopes, the Mars rovers, planetary orbiters, deep space probes, and Earth observation satellites. It gets about 25% of Nasa’s budget, but for the half-century since the end of the Apollo programme, it has been responsible for close to 100% of the agency’s accomplishments.

The Trump administration has proposed to devastate this section of Nasa by cutting its budget in half, while leaving the wasteful parts of the space agency nearly unscathed. If the cuts are not stopped by Congressional resistance, some 50 working spacecraft already operating in space — including the Curiosity Mars rover, all the space telescopes except Webb (and maybe for a while Hubble), the Mars Odyssey and MAVEN orbiters circling Mars, the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, the New Horizons and Voyager mission that probed the outer planets and are now probing the Kuiper Belt, and most of the Earth observation satellites — will all be shut down. Furthermore, missions currently in the pipeline, including the Roman space telescope (already built and waiting for launch next year) and the Dragonfly mission to Titan, and many others, will be aborted, and there will be no new starts after that.

If Trump actually were interested in getting Americans to the Red Planet, the last thing he would do would be to destroy the existing Mars exploration programme. This is so not only because robotic explorers are the essential scouts needed to prepare and support human expeditions, but for political reasons as well. Contrary to Trump’s inauguration speech boast, there is zero chance that his administration will even attempt a human Mars mission during his four-year term. In order to last long enough to be successful, any humans-to-Mars programme will need bipartisan support. Such support could be readily obtained by allying the humans-to-Mars effort with the largely university-based Mars exploration programme. Doing so would make a great deal of engineering sense too, as the best way to test out the heavy payload delivery systems human Mars missions need would be to use them first to land large robotic expeditions on the Red Planet. These could deliver dozens of rovers and helicopters to Mars at a time, collectively carrying hundreds of instruments and experiments supported by thousands of university investigators. This would not only produce a massive scientific bonanza, but provide a strong political base for the programme among the Left-leaning university research community. But doing this requires scaling up the robotic exploration effort. Instead, Trump is murdering it, in the process putting a mark of Cain on his putative programme that would insure its destruction as soon as the political fortunes of war shift.

But it is worse than that. Under the Trump administration’s plan, not only the Mars exploration programme, but the entirety of Nasa’s terrific space astronomy and planetary exploration programmes will be effectively wiped out. This epic programme is not just a jewel in the space agency’s crown. It stands, as the Gothic cathedrals did in medieval times, as the greatest celebration of one of the highest ideals of modern Western civilisation — the search for truth through science. Nasa’s space science programme is very much the flag of modern science, and the Trumpists are disdainfully burning that flag.

It is quite true that many of the science-wreckers infesting the Trump administration have taken to wearing prominently displayed crosses. But religion isn’t the problem here. While Christianity is certainly not science, it actually shares some important common roots.

A core idea underlying Western civilisation, advanced by the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates and Plato, is that there is an innate faculty of the human mind capable of distinguishing right from wrong, justice from injustice, truth from untruth. Embraced by early Christianity, this idea became the basis of the concept of the conscience, which therefore became the axiomatic foundation of Western morality. It is also the basis for natural law, the theory that moral principles are real and can be identified from human conscience. The idea that the human mind can distinguish truth from untruth is also the basis for science, man’s search for universal truths through the tools of reason.

As the great Renaissance scientist Johannes Kepler, the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, put it: “Geometry is one and eternal, a reflection out of the mind of God. That mankind shares in it is one reason to call man the image of God.” In other words, the human mind, because it is the image of God, is able to understand the laws of the universe. It was the forceful demonstration of this proposition by Kepler, Galileo and others that let loose the scientific revolution in the West.

Over the years, science and Christianity have frequently disagreed on what the truth might be. But nevertheless, they have agreed strongly on the most fundamental point: that there is such a thing as the truth, and finding it is among the highest of human callings.

It is this intellectual foundation that drove the West’s creation of science, and which has continued to motivate those moved by a Judeo-Christian outlook to broadly support the scientific enterprise. This has not been without practical consequences. The Catholic Church, for example, not only created the first universities, but has extensively funded astronomical observatories and medical research centres right up to the present. In 2005, I was able to convince the highly religious Senate Science Committee Chairman Sam Brownback to reverse the decision by Sean O’Keefe, the then-Nasa administrator, to abandon the Hubble Space Telescope. As I pointed out to Brownback, it is through learning about creation that we can learn about the Creator.

Trump, in contrast, denies the relevance of truth. As part of his political makeover from a sexual epicure to a conservative, Trump has taken to waving crosses around. But the President is more of a Nietzschean than a Christian. For him there is no good or evil, justice or injustice, truth or untruth — it’s all just bullshit. He spouts lies as readily as a sow pisses. And he can do this because he has no intent to convince, but only to confuse.

This is not a worldview that is supportive of science. Where the leader goes, the followers follow. It is impossible to serve both Trump and the truth. The real problem with the Trump administration is not that it is filled with Christians, but that it is packed with Philistines.

And now the Trump administration is promising a return to the Moon via the Artemis programme. Yet, put simply, Artemis is a fraud. While vast amounts of money are being distributed to contractors, there is no real intent at the top to use the programme to send astronauts to the Moon. This can be seen by examining the programme’s design, if it can be called that, which consists of five primary flight elements which do not fit together to enable any functional mission capability. Instead, each of those five elements — the SLS heavy lift booster, the SpaceX Starship, the Orion capsule, the National Lander, and the Lunar Orbit Gateway station — is being funded as an independent project whose primary purpose is to support the companies that are working on it.

The SLS will only fly once every three years, so it is just useless. Starship could be a useful heavy lift vehicle for the programme, but in order to create a nominal role for SLS, it will be employed instead as a lunar landing and ascent vehicle. But Starship has an empty mass of 100 tonnes — 50 times more than that of the Lunar Excursion Module used during the Apollo programme — making it wildly impractical to serve in such a capacity. When Starship got the Human Landing System contract, the National Team, led by Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin, demanded that they get a contract too. This might have made sense, had Nasa insisted that they build a reusable lander employing the same methane/oxygen propellent as Starship, so that a Starship stationed in lunar orbit could serve as a tanker supporting orbit to surface excursions by their much lighter vehicle.

But instead, since the goal was just to appease the National Team by sending it cash, Nasa allowed them go their merry way with an expendable hydrogen/oxygen-propelled lander that can’t be supported by Starship or anything else. With a weight of 26 tonnes, the Orion capsule is too heavy for the SLS to deliver to low lunar orbit with enough propellant to come home, and so can only go to a Gateway station in high lunar orbit instead.  This serves to provide a nominal function for the Gateway, which otherwise serves none. In fact, far from being part of rational lunar programme design, the Gateway was conceived of by the Obama administration prior to the invention of Artemis as an (absurd) alternative destination to send astronauts in place of going to the Moon. But the Trump team decided to make it part of Artemis, and to pretend it is necessary, imposed a requirement that all excursion vehicles must travel back and forth from its position in high lunar orbit to the surface instead of from low orbit. As a result, the Gateway greatly increases excursion vehicle propulsion requirements. Instead of being called a Gateway, it would be more proper to call it a Tollbooth — and a very expensive one at that.

Artemis is not a Moon programme divided into five independent efforts. It is a flim-flam man’s cover story for five random pork-barrel programmes that don’t lead anywhere.

The bottom line is this: unlike the purpose-driven Sixties Apollo Moon programme, Artemis is vendor driven. While Apollo spent money to do things, Artemis does things in order to spend money. Artemis was started eight years ago by the first Trump administration, yet a piloted landing on the lunar surface is nowhere in sight. Eight years after John F. Kennedy announced the Apollo programme, astronauts were walking on the Moon. The difference is that while Apollo was real, Artemis is bullshit.

Engineering, though, cannot be based on bullshit. Engineering must be based on truth. The truth is that you can’t conduct a Moon programme using a random set of vendor-supported hardware elements that don’t fit together. Reality-deniers may pretend that you can, but that is just bullshit. Reality-deniers may claim they are working on getting humans to the Red Planet while they are wrecking the Mars exploration programme — but that is just bullshit too.

This is the problem that Jared Isaacman needs to solve if he gets the job. Isaacman is a very accomplished businessman, with a demonstrated commitment to advance science and expand humanity’s reach into space. He is fully qualified to be Nasa administrator, and I believe the Senate will confirm his appointment to that post with solid bipartisan support.

But once he gets the job, he will be working for a team that does not believe reality is relevant. If he wants to save the space science programme, let alone get Americans to the Moon or Mars, he will need to restore respect for the truth. That will be the real challenge.

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