FPI / April 18, 2025

Geostrategy-Direct

By Richard Fisher

In December 2017, President Donald Trump revived the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) manned mission to the Moon after it had been cancelled by President Barack Obama in 2010.

In mid-2022, China’s chief Mars probe designer Sun Zezhou outlined two schedules for a Chinese Mars Sample Return mission that would launch in 2028 and return Mars samples to Earth in July 2031. / Chinese Internet

Then, in his Jan. 20, 2025 inauguration speech, Trump lifted NASA’s goals higher by declaring, “And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”

But NASA will also have to face some fiscal gravity; It too is being asked to make budget cutbacks in order for President Trump to meet his goal, told to reporters on Feb. 11, to cut as much as $1 trillion from the $6.75 trillion U.S. Federal Budget.

In an April 11 report for Ars Technica, Eric Berger broke the story that the new Trump White House had passed an initial 2026 budget proposal to NASA that cut 20 percent or about $5 billion from its about $25 billion budget.

While most funding for manned Moon and Mars programs are sustained, most of the cuts would be in NASA space science budget, falling by about 50 percent from $7.5 billion to $3.9 billion, with a 30 percent cut to Planetary Science, down to $1.9 billion.

Among the main cuts reported by Berger include the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope that uses infrared sensors that can help find exoplanets around distant stars and the troubled Mars sample return mission.

China, however, in late March offered new details on its future planetary science missions that include a 2029 mission to the Jupiter Moon Callisto, often viewed as a possible human destination, a 2033 mission to collect atmospheric particles from Venus, then a 2038 launch of a long-term unmanned research station on Mars, and then a 2039 unmanned probe to Neptune.

All of these unmanned missions are in support of China’s longer-term goal to send manned missions to Mars and then to other planetary bodies in our Solar System.

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