This month
“The Moon is a distraction,” said Elon Musk in January of last year, during the peak of his political influence. “We’re going straight to Mars.” Consistent, certainly, for Musk, but likely a surprise to NASA, which had awarded SpaceX more than $4 billion in contracts for multiple lunar landings with Starship. But for a brief moment at the start of the second Trump administration, Mars was ascendant. Americans would “plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars,” declared President Trump during his inaugural address just weeks later. The future of Artemis appeared dim.
This was not idle talk. The administration’s first budget for NASA took an axe to Artemis. It proposed to immediately cancel the Gateway lunar space station and the Space Launch System and Orion program after Artemis III. Gone were mentions of future Artemis missions. Nearly $1 billion in funding was shifted into a crash humans-to-Mars program, which included near-term launches of massive landing systems and future billions promised for a commercial Moon-to-Mars transportation system (for SpaceX’s Starship, what else?). Companies and NASA centers alike pivoted to concepts that supported humans to Mars, sensing the shift of political winds.
As I predicted, this rash and ill-defined Mars plan failed. Within a week of this proposal, the U.S. Congress had added a $10 billion amendment to a reconciliation bill that outright rejected the cancellation of Orion, SLS, and Gateway. The 2026 NASA appropriations mentioned Mars only a handful of times, mainly to establish a modest fund for future Mars science missions and to explicitly ban any reallocation of funds from Artemis to commercial Moon-to-Mars transportation activities. The president himself seemed to have second thoughts about the Mars goal within months of his inauguration. Musk departed the administration in June. The geopolitical competition with China began to dominate the political discussion around Artemis by mid-summer. And in the fall, Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy reopened the Artemis III landing contract to other competitors, fearing that Starship would not be ready.
The White House itself put the final nail in the humans-to-Mars coffin. In December, it released updated policy guidance that declared that the U.S. will land astronauts on the Moon through the Artemis program and establish “initial elements” of a permanent lunar base by 2030. Mars was demoted in both detail and priority, with NASA now directed to merely “prepare for the journey to Mars,” ironically reminiscent of the similarly indefinite platitudes of the Obama-era space exploration policy.
2025 was a stress test of the Artemis coalition. It emerged stronger than ever. Critiques of Artemis’s Frankenstein-like program assemblage are common, but they tend to miss the point. Artemis was optimized not for engineering or cost efficiency, but for political survival. And before one dismisses this, recall that every other attempt by NASA to return astronauts to the Moon was cancelled by a subsequent presidential administration. Artemis has now survived two presidential transitions and is on the cusp of sending astronauts beyond Earth orbit for the first time in over half a century. That in itself is an achievement. The coalition representing the Space Shuttle workforce (now applied to the Space Launch System), new space companies, international partnerships, and geopolitical competition, once established, is durable. This past year proved that. This was not an accident. Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council under the first Trump administration, who helped guide the establishment of Artemis, had for many years argued that the Moon was uniquely compatible with this realpolitik approach. This “Pace Doctrine” seems to have won out.
Occupy Moon. Elon Musk’s Mars efforts, however, are independent of coalitional politics. Surely this privately held company, backed by the world’s richest person with a 25-year monomaniacal commitment to settling humans on Mars, would carry on the effort? “SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon,” posted Musk earlier this month. Building a city on Mars is now a goal for “about 5-7 years from now”.
Political coalitions are stable. One-person endeavors are not. There is a larger lesson here regarding achieving national goals in space. A national goal must be a national goal; it cannot and should not rely on the interests of a small number of individuals. Individuals are idiosyncratic. They can change their minds, lose interest, or become actively hostile. They are democratically unaccountable. The speed and efficiency of private companies cuts both ways.
Mars is still worth exploring. The scientific case for returning to Mars (and for returning samples from Mars) remains strong. The potential biosignature currently ensconced in the belly of the Perseverance rover is motivation in and of itself. And regardless of what SpaceX does or does not do, or what destination is pursued by human spaceflight, our curiosity about Mars and the secrets it still holds should compel us to continue our exploration.
Until next month,
Casey Dreier
Chief of Space Policy
The Planetary Society