A historian who met with Donald Trump says the president-elect was “very interested in a man going to the moon.”
Historian Douglas Brinkley met with Trump at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Wednesday afternoon.
Brinkley told reporters after the meeting his conversation with Trump focused on “Nixon and Reagan and Kennedy … a sort of history of the presidency and past inaugurals and things like that.”
He also mentioned that Trump “was very interested in a man going to the moon and the moon shot so we were talking a little bit about that.”
Brinkley is a professor at Rice University, where former President John F. Kennedy famously delivered his “we choose to go to the moon” speech in 1962.
The Washington Examiner has requested comments from Brinkley and a Trump spokeswoman.
Trump did not talk about NASA very much during the campaign. But there has been speculation about Trump’s potential space ambitions.
“It is very plausible to speculate that the new administration will insert a mission to the lunar surface, probably international in character, as a step on the way to Mars,” John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute, told the Washington Post in November.
“Politically, most of the other countries of the world have identified the moon as an interesting destination, and they don’t really have the capabilities to talk about sending people to Mars,” Logsdon said. “If we want to assert international leadership, we would take a position in leading a coalition to return to the moon.”
Trump’s ally and adviser, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, also memorably promised to build a space colony on the moon when he ran for president in 2012.
