“NASA on Tuesday delayed its plans to return astronauts to the surface of the moon, announcing the agency is targeting 2025 for a crewed landing. NASA’s new schedule represents a delay from the previous goal of 2024, set by former President Donald Trump’s administration in 2017 – which represented an ambitious push from the agency’s target of 2028 before Trump took office. ‘The Trump administration’s target of 2024 human landing was not grounded in technical feasibility,’ NASA administrator Bill Nelson told reporters on a conference call” CNBC reports.
Had he still been in office, Trump would probably be pretty pissed over this – or the delay wouldn’t have happened at all and astronauts’ lives would be risked by his recklessness. Per a 2019 report in New York Magazine previewing a book by former White House aide Cliff Sims, Trump offered NASA unlimited funding if the agency would find a way to land an American astronaut on Mars by 2020 so he could campaign for reelection on the achievement. When former NASA Chief Robert Lightfoot Jr told him it just wasn’t going to happen, Trump was “visibly disappointed”, Sims wrote.