President Trump is looking for a fight to win and he’s settled on space — specifically, landing Americans on the moon. The only problem is that space shouldn’t be a fight, and, even if it were, landing on the moon (again) isn’t a battle to be won.
Don’t tell that to Vice President Mike Pence, though. This week, he was Trump’s designated messenger to tell NASA that they need to pick up the pace and send Americans back to the moon ASAP.
And, in fulfilling that mission, Pence did Trump’s bidding quite well. Even though the current timetable has a moon landing set for 2028, Pence made clear that he wanted it by 2024, telling his audience: “It is the stated policy of this administration and the United States of America to return astronauts to the moon within the next five years.”
More than that, he took the opportunity to hammer the agency’s current efforts, proclaiming that the 2028 goal “is just not good enough” and adding, echoing a high school football coach, “we are better than that.”
But space is not a sports game, and scientists aren’t hanging around waiting for Gatorade and a pep talk.
For one thing, the competition for the moon that Pence spent so much time talking about isn’t even a competition at all. Right now, space is actually one of the few areas where the U.S. is working well with countries such as Russia and China.
Not only do Russian rockets carry U.S. astronauts to the jointly operated international space station, but China’s landing on the far side of the moon marked the first time since 2011 that NASA and Beijing shared data, collaboration that will likely help the U.S. with Trump’s goal of getting to the moon.
That should be a model that we are looking to replicate in other sectors, not relationships we are eager to shred in the name of fostering one-sided competition.
Moreover, even if China’s and Russia’s space programs were “adversaries” racing to dominate space, landing humans on the moon’s surface isn’t where the action is in 2019, even if it was in 1961. The reason? The U.S. already won that race more than five decades ago. Now, the real reason to go to space isn’t footprints and flags, but data. And that data, as several recent missions have demonstrated, requires robots, not humans.
Landing on the moon, like bringing back manufacturing jobs and coal production, is an outdated idea of success from a time that Trump can’t seem to realize is long past. An obsessive focus on such ideas will only pull resources and attention from real issues and new possibilities. This is exactly what is happening at NASA, with proposed budget cuts and a delusional drive to see another moon landing overshadowing other projects. Research that might truly allow the U.S. to cement its place as a now and future leader is being sidelined in favor of anachronistic and irrelevant goals.
