The kicker is that the astronauts were literally sitting in the audience. NASA’s Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen attended the event as guests of House Speaker Mike Johnson. The Artemis 2 mission will send them on a 10-day trip around the moon this year, which will be the first lunar flight in more than 50 years and the most distant human space flight in history.
Artemis 2 is essential to ushering in the “golden age of American space leadership” that the Trump administration often touts, so it was confusing to say the least. However, the President vaguely mentioned the glory of the Apollo era and praised the US Space Force.
“The Space Force is my baby,” Trump said. “We did it. My baby is becoming very important.”
missed opportunity
The first crewed flight of NASA’s Artemis program is an important step toward the country’s long-awaited return to the lunar surface. By validating the human-rated performance of the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, Artemis 2 will pave the way for a crewed lunar landing and subsequent missions that will build the infrastructure to maintain a continued human presence on the Moon.
This will be essential to maintaining U.S. leadership in space and launching future Mars missions – both key pillars of the Trump administration’s space flight agenda. China’s own progress toward a crewed moon landing has increased the stakes for NASA’s Artemis program, giving it a renewed sense of urgency.
The State of the Union could have been a powerful opportunity for Trump to highlight these facts and introduce Americans to astronauts who will help turn his administration’s vision for American spaceflight into reality. And boy, Artemis 2 could sure use the attention right now. Despite the immense importance of this mission, it has struggled to gain public interest. Even some space flight enthusiasts are becoming frustrated as technical problems continue to push back the launch date. With SLS and Orion returning to NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs today, Artemis 2 will now launch in April at the earliest.
This is more than a PR problem. NASA needs public support for Artemis 2 because taxpayer funding and voting power will determine whether the program will run long enough to secure American leadership in space and advance human exploration deeper into the solar system. Without sustained public interest and political will, this multi-billion dollar effort will soon become an easy budgetary target.
But Trump didn’t use his speech to shed light on the mission and its crew or restore Americans’ confidence that it would launch this year — something he could have easily managed by borrowing a minute from his largely inaccurate rhetoric about economic growth or his anti-Democrat speech. With this insult, the President squandered an opportunity to rally the country around one of its most inspiring endeavors and, in doing so, undermined his own space policy.
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