Trump Administration Science & Technology Highlights: Year One, Office of Science and Technology Policy
Keith’s note: here is an excerpt on space from Trump Administration Science & Technology Highlights: Year One, Office of Science and Technology Policy, pages 49-55 – (excerpt below).
Space
“With our incredible Guardians in the U.S. Space Force protecting America’s interests in space, we are securing the systems that power exploration, defense, and communication. We are building strength, expanding freedom, and ensuring that the American flag remains the ultimate symbol of leadership across the final frontier.” – President Donald J. Trump, July 20, 2025
Space is the ultimate high ground for America’s national security, prosperity, and scientific leadership. From GPS to communication networks to missile-warning systems, space-based assets protect our homeland, offer conveniences for every-day life, and underpin much of our modern economy. At the same time, space represents boundless opportunity: new frontiers for exploration, new industries and technologies waiting to be born, and new discoveries that will expand the boundaries of human knowledge.
Building on actions taken in his first Administration, President Trump is once again putting renewed emphasis on ensuring American superiority in space exploration, defense, and economic development. In January 2025 President Trump issued Executive Order 14186, “The Iron Dome for America,” calling for a next-generation missile defense shield that will include a key element of using space-based assets to detect and intercept attacks against the United States. The Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 Administration Research and Development Budget Priorities and Cross-Cutting Actions memo, released in September 2025, calls for R&D investments to assure America’s continued space dominance for both civilian and defense mission needs that prioritize ambitious targets, unlock new mission capabilities, enable discoveries, and achieve exploration goals. On December 18, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14369, “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” which calls for a space policy that will extend the reach of human discovery, secure the Nation’s vital economic and security interests, unleash commercial development, and lay the foundation for a new space age.
President Trump has long viewed space as critical to the future of the United States. In his first Presidential Administration, he took a number of steps to renew U.S. leadership in space exploration, including issuing a series of Space Policy Directives: SPD-1 Reinvigorating America’s Human Space Exploration Program (2017), SPD-2 Streamlining Regulations on Commercial Use of Space (2018), SPD-3 National Space Traffic Management Policy (2018), SPD-4 Establishment of the United States Space Force (2019), SPD-5 Cybersecurity Principles for Space Systems (2020), SPD-6 National Strategy for Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion (2020), and SPD-7 U.S. Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Policy (2021). Specific achievements in the Trump 45 Administration include re-establishing the National Space Council, directing NASA to embark on a journey back to the Moon, the first all- woman spacewalk, the first crewed launch to the International Space Station from American soil in a commercially-built and operated American crew spacecraft, reaching new frontiers in the robotic exploration of the Solar System (including launch of the Mars Perseverance Rover and the Parker Solar Probe), and the release, from the New Horizons mission, of the first detailed image of the most distant object ever explored in the solar system—the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule
Highlights
Space Exploration
Enabling a Meaningful and Sustained Presence on the Moon. The December 2025 Executive Order on “Ensuring American Space Superiority” refocuses America’s space program to commit to a lunar surface landing by 2028, as well as establishing the initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost by 2030. These efforts will lay the foundations of lunar economic development, prepare for the journey to Mars, and inspire the next generation of American explorers. The Executive Order also calls for defending America’s national and economic security interests in, from, and to space, for the first time articulating that America will detect, characterize, and counter threats to U.S. interests from very low-Earth orbit through cislunar space, including any adversary placement of a nuclear weapon in space. It also kicks off a National Initiative to focus the power of American innovation to develop nuclear reactors for space applications. The Order calls for nuclear power demonstrations on the Moon and in space, including a lunar surface reactor ready for launch by 2030.
Getting Artemis II Ready to Send Americans Around the Moon. The Artemis Program is returning Americans to the Moon. Started by President Trump in his first term, the Nation is embarking on an exciting journey to send Americans around the Moon in 2026 for the first crewed Artemis mission. This will reaffirm our commitment to space exploration and send a clear signal to the world that America is once again leading the way to the stars. NASA recently completed stacking of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for Artemis II. Teams integrated elements manufactured across the country at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, including the rocket’s boosters and core stage, as well as Orion’s stage adapter and launch abort system. The Artemis II crew participated in more than 30 mission simulations alongside teams on the ground, ensuring that the crew and launch, flight, and recovery teams are prepared for any situation that may arise during the test flight. Soon, crew will don their survival suits and get strapped into Orion during a countdown demonstration test, serving as a dress rehearsal for launch day. NASA worked with the Department of War to conduct a week-long underway recovery test in preparation to safely collect the Artemis II astronauts after they splash down following their mission.
Expanding the Artemis Accords to Promote Peaceful Space Exploration. The Department of State led diplomatic and public diplomacy efforts to strengthen U.S. leadership in space exploration, applications, and commercialization by increasing understanding of, and support for, U.S. national space policies and programs and to encourage the foreign use of U.S. space capabilities, systems, and services. In 2020, in President Trump’s first term, the U.S. launched the Artemis Accords to guide civil space exploration and use in the 21st century. In the last year, eight countries signed on including Finland, Bangladesh, Senegal, Hungary, the Philippines, Portugal, Norway, Malaysia, bringing the total to 60 signatories.
Deepening Bilateral Space Collaborations. In 2025, the U.S. hosted bilateral convenings to reaffirm enduring partnerships and commitments to the responsible and peaceful uses and exploration of outer space, including with Argentina, the Republic of Korea (ROK), the E.U., and Italy, and signed a new bilateral space framework agreement with Australia. The fourth U.S.-ROK Civil Space Dialogue, hosted by the U.S. on April 14, strengthened the U.S.-ROK Alliance through space exploration cooperation on Artemis and other missions, and facilitated ROK investments in capabilities that support shared goals in Moon and Mars exploration. In September 2025, the U.S. hosted the 13th U.S.-E.U. Space Dialogue to advance shared space priorities, including addressing space-related security threats and promote innovation by leveraging cutting-edge commercial capabilities in support of U.S. and E.U. space activities. The Positioning, Navigation, and Timing working group continued its efforts to promote compatibility and non-interference between GPS and the E.U.’s Galileo systems. The Copernicus Coordination Group shared how a mutually beneficial relationship between satellite systems allows both the United States and the E.U. to establish state-of-the-art observing systems at a lower cost to taxpayers, enabling user communities to benefit from more data, increased forecast accuracy, and better timeliness and robustness of the observing systems.
Sustaining 25 Years of Continuous Human Presence on the International Space Station (ISS). 2025 marked the 25th consecutive year of continuous human presence in America’s orbiting laboratory. This remarkable achievement was made possible by the profound capacity of America’s space workforce to safely build, operate, and maintain the most complex spacecraft in history. While previous administrations allowed our focus to drift, the Trump Administration has taken decisive action to ensure America’s complete dominance in space. Under the Executive Order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” President Trump has renewed America’s commitment to a thriving commercial marketplace in low-Earth orbit and a pathway to replace the Station by 2030.
Commercial Space
Promoting Commercial Space Innovation by Reducing Regulatory Barriers and Enhancing Coordination. On August 13, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14335 “Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry,” which eliminates wasteful or duplicative regulations that have long inhibited innovation in the commercial space industry. The Order elevates the Office of Space Commerce to an independent office in the Department of Commerce, giving the commercial space industry long-overdue visibility. The Order also reforms the process for authorizing novel space activities, requiring the Secretary of Commerce to propose a process for mission authorizations for activities covered under Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. This long overdue action will provide regulatory certainty and investor confidence for new and original commercial space ventures.
Celebrating a Record Year for Space Launches. In 2025, there were a record 176 successful orbital space launches from the United States, including a record 109 launches from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station – Kennedy Space Center range complex. Under the Executive Orders “Ensuring American Space Superiority” and “Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry,” President Trump recommits America to a path of space dominance and commercial space leadership, removing barriers to launch and creating new incentive structures to build space infrastructure. These actions ensure that America remains the space superpower.
Space Security
Building a Big Beautiful Golden Dome to Protect the Homeland. The January 2025 Executive Order “Iron Dome for America” commits the nation to deliver a homeland missile defense architecture to respond to the catastrophic threats of advanced missiles and aerial attacks. President Trump’s Peace Through Strength vision was codified in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, putting a $24.4 billion down payment for integrated air and missile defense that will ensure America’s security for generations to come. The President took further action under the Executive Order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” calling for demonstration of protype next-generation missile defense technologies by 2028. The DOW acquisition community has rapidly realigned the nation’s missile defense R&D efforts with the Golden Dome plan; the first set of awards for space-based missile interceptors were awarded in November 2025. In December, MDA awarded additional Scalable Homeland Innovation Enterprise Layered Defense contracts that will advance our homeland missile defense capabilities.
Completing Ten Launches to Support our Nation’s Decisive Intelligence Advantage. The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) launched 10 missions in 2025, including several launches of NRO’s proliferated architecture. This constellation continues to add capability and resilience to our intelligence mission through shorter revisit times, increased observational persistence, and faster processing and transmission of data. Over the last two years, NRO has launched more than 200 satellites, creating the largest and most capable government constellation in orbit in our nation’s history.
Rebuilding America’s Military Might in Space. In 2025, the United States Space Force (USSF) launched several missions, including the first tranche of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture Tracking Layer satellites. In May 2025, the Space Force also launched the eighth GPS III satellite, enhancing the Nation’s resilience for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services. The USSF launched several research and development satellites, including the Navigation Technology Satellite 3 testbed, which will de-risk new resilient PNT capabilities, the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle with several onboard experiments, and the STP-S30 mission in partnership with NASA to demonstrate the novel DiskSat architecture.
Inaugurating a New Era in Space Domain Awareness. On September 30, 2025, the United States Space Force announced the operational acceptance of the Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis System (ATLAS), revitalizing an aging and labor-intensive capability with modern and agile practices to enable military readiness in an increasingly congested space environment. ATLAS allows the Space Force to assure spaceflight safety and observe, attribute, and respond to adversary actions in space, ensure the responsible use of space by all parties, and enable U.S. freedom of action in all orbital regimes. ATLAS is intended to eventually remove operational dependencies on the more than 30-year-old legacy Space Defense Operations Center (SPADOC) system and will provide a modernized and integrated system that enables responsive and resilient capabilities for space operations centers.
Planetary Defense: Protecting the Earth and Humanity from Natural Disasters. In defense of Earth and protecting humanity, NASA has continued to monitor a near-Earth object that triggered potential impact notifications. Scientists have worked to calculate more precise impact models, noting that the asteroid, which poses no significant threat to Earth, has only a 0.0004% chance of hitting our planet. Work continued on the NASA Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, expected to launch in 2027, and is designed to help advance the Nation’s ability to discover and characterize most of the potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit.
Space Science
Pursuing Science and Technology Demonstrations on and Around the Moon. NASA selected a host of science studies for the Artemis II mission, including efforts that focus on astronaut health, as well as those that will provide insight for mission planning and site selection for future lunar missions. Experiments and technology demonstrations aboard the Commercial Lunar Payload Services flights included an electrodynamic dust shield, a lunar navigation system, high-performance computing, and collection of more than 9,000 first-of- a-kind images of the lunar lander’s engine plumes. NASA teams have studied regolith (lunar dirt and rocks) in a simulated lunar gravity environment and tested how solid materials catch fire in space. The agency’s 55-pound CubeSat in lunar orbit, CAPSTONE, exceeded 1,000 days in space, serving as a testbed for autonomous navigation and in-space communications. NASA published findings from an Artemis I experiment highlighting why green algae may be a very good deep space travel companion.
Improving Our Understanding of the Sun and Space Weather. In 2025, NASA, NOAA, and mission partners launched an armada of five critical space weather missions: Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH), Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites (TRACERS), Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and Space Weather Follow On – Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1). This historic achievement will advance the state of heliophysics science and deliver operational readiness for space weather hazards. Together, these missions will enable us to understand the mysteries of the Sun, as well as protect America’s power grid, our satellites, and our way of life from the devastating effects of solar storms. In May 2025, scientists at the U.S. National Science Foundation National Solar Observatory and the New Jersey Institute of Technology used a new optical system to capture the most detailed images to date of the complex movements in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona. This technology will allow scientists to better understand the extreme nature of the corona and produce computer models that more accurately predict space weather and potential Earth-impacting solar flares. In addition, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe team shared new images of the Sun’s atmosphere, taken closer to the star than ever captured before.
Enabling Discovery On- and Off-Planet. In 2025, NASA launched several historic science missions. The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar is the largest joint U.S.-India collaborative science project to date, and will provide breathtaking radar imagery of Earth’s surface to enable discoveries of our home planet. NASA also launched the SPHEREx all-sky infrared survey telescope, which will capture 450 million galaxies along with over 100 million stars in the Milky Way in order to explore the origins of the universe, as well as the ESCAPADE mission to study the Martian atmosphere and real-time response to solar wind, enabling future missions to the Red Planet. ESCAPADE was launched on a Blue Origin New Glenn Rocket, marking the first time the company has successfully recovered a booster stage, and collecting data to certify the mission for future national security payloads.
Coordinating a Solar System-Wide Observation Campaign. Garnering significant interest this year, NASA has coordinated a solar system-wide observation campaign to follow comet 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object to pass through our solar system. To date, 12 NASA spacecraft and space-based telescopes have captured and processed imagery of the comet since its discovery in the summer.
Promoting Progress in Astrobiology. NASA’s Perseverance rover found a sample on Mars that potentially contains biosignatures, substances or structures that might have a biological origin but require additional data and studying before any conclusions can be reached about the absence or presence of life. NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars found the largest organic compounds on the Red Planet to date. Teams also are working to develop technologies for the Habitable Worlds Observatory; the agency now has tallied 6,000 exoplanets. Samples from asteroid Bennu revealed sugars, amino acids, and other life-building molecules.
Releasing Unprecedented Images of the Southern Sky. In June 2025, the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a major new scientific facility on a mountaintop in Chile jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, released its first imagery. The observatory will repeatedly conduct a survey of the southern sky to create a ten- year record of the cosmos from our vantage. In just over 10 hours of test observations, Rubin captured millions of galaxies and Milky Way stars and thousands of asteroids. The imagery is a small preview of Rubin Observatory’s upcoming scientific mission to explore and understand some of the universe’s biggest mysteries.
Building a Flagship Observatory and Telescope. Assembly of NASA’s next flagship observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is completed, with final testing underway. The telescope will help answer questions about dark energy and exoplanets and will be ready to launch as early as fall of 2026. The agency’s newest operating flagship telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, now in its third year, continued to transform our understanding of the universe, and Hubble celebrated its 35th year with a 2.5- gigapixel Andromeda galaxy mosaic.