In 2017, when President Trump took office the first time, U.S. space policy was adrift. Major projects had run wildly over budget and the goals of the country’s manned space program were fuzzy. No U.S. astronaut had been beyond low Earth orbit since the final Apollo mission in 1972. The first Trump administration made major policy changes. It pushed Congress and NASA to unite behind a plan, dubbed Artemis, that aims to return astronauts to the Moon—and eventually send them on to Mars. Trump reorganized orbital military operations under the U.S. Space Force, freeing NASA to focus strictly on civilian missions. And Trump’s appointees helped strengthen NASA’s commercial space program which allows the agency to hire private companies, notably SpaceX, to launch NASA astronauts and cargo at lower costs.
As Trump returns to the White House, however, most of those accomplishments are at risk. The budget overruns that hobble NASA’s ambitions have only gotten worse. The promised Artemis Moon landing keeps getting delayed. And, while NASA’s commercial contracts with SpaceX have saved taxpayers tens of billions, the agency’s effort to help Boeing develop its own commercial vehicle has been an embarrassing flop. The International Space Station—our country’s only human outpost in space—is aging and slated for retirement in five years. Meanwhile, China is expanding its own modular space station and aims to land Chinese taikonauts on the Moon by 2030. In short, America’s manned space program is stumbling, while our key global competitor races ahead.
The new administration has a golden opportunity to save NASA and restore America’s status as the global leader in space. Trump’s promising nominee as NASA Administrator, private astronaut and entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, still awaits confirmation. But Trump appointees are already reviewing NASA’s programs, and analysts from the Department of Government Efficiency are beginning to audit the agency’s $25 billion budget. As in other departments, the process is off to a somewhat chaotic start. But NASA employees have so far been spared indiscriminate mass layoffs. Despite the uncertainty, many longtime space advocates—including staffers within NASA itself—are hoping to see major reforms in the space agency and in the government’s broader space policies.
But correcting NASA’s failures without derailing U.S. ambitions in space will take a combination of boldness and political deftness. NASA programs play out over decades and require bipartisan support in Congress. If they are to bear fruit, ambitious plans set in motion by this presidency must survive through future changes in administration, including periods when Democrats might hold the office. Today, a diverse array of space boosters, entrepreneurs, and NASA insiders backs aggressive reform. One key to building a successful, enduring U.S. space policy will be keeping that coalition intact. Here, Elon Musk’s extraordinary role as the president’s budgetary hatchet man entails both benefits and risks. Musk is a historic innovator in space technology; his advice is invaluable. (And NASA would be effectively grounded today without the services of his company SpaceX.) But the entrepreneur’s flamboyant partisanship risks making difficult reform decisions even more controversial. NASA’s wide bipartisan support could evaporate quickly if the public comes to see the agency as Musk’s personal fiefdom.
Over the past several months, I’ve been researching NASA history and interviewing reform advocates for an upcoming Manhattan Institute report. Based on that reporting, I offer three major policy shifts the Trump administration should pursue immediately.
Get NASA out of the rocket-building business. Most Americans, including members of Congress, still see NASA’s Apollo program as the paradigm of human space flight. NASA designed the massive Saturn V rocket, hired veteran aerospace contractors to build it, and then expertly flew it to glory. But Apollo was a one-off. In the half century since that program ended, NASA has been held back by human spaceflight systems of its own design that cost too much and fly too little.
“Apollo was the single real success in human space flight, a program that came in on time, on budget, and delivered,” Lori Garver told me. Garver, who served as the agency’s deputy administrator from 2009 to 2013, is a lifelong advocate for reforms including allowing NASA to rely more heavily on public-private partnerships.
After Apollo, NASA attempted to build an affordable, reusable space plane. But the resulting space shuttle instead proved to be a fragile, accident-prone craft that was too expensive to fly more than a handful of missions each year. In 2005, as the shuttle neared retirement, NASA proposed replacing it with a massive rocket the agency’s administrator described as “Apollo on steroids.” That project was scuttled in 2011 after an independent commission found the plan “unsustainable.” At that point, Garver and other NASA leaders advised launching U.S. astronauts into orbit on rockets built and flown by private companies. A small program was already underway to help SpaceX and other companies develop that capability. But Congress insisted that NASA also had to build its own rocket. And so the Space Launch System (SLS), a huge, heavy-lift rocket partly assembled from existing space shuttle components, was born. The rocket’s basic elements were dictated, not by NASA engineers, but by powerful senators who wanted to ensure that NASA dollars would continue flowing to their states.
The SLS rocket—which critics call the “Senate Launch System”—became a case study in how not to build space hardware. Despite spending nearly $24 billion on SLS, another $20 billion on the Orion capsule it carries, and blowing past the original first-mission target of 2016, NASA has managed to launch just a single, uncrewed test flight of the platform to date. And, despite all that investment, SLS/Orion is obsolete even before it enters regular service. At a time when SpaceX is slashing launch costs by building reusable boosters, SLS is an old-school expendable system; every component except the Orion capsule must be discarded in the course of every flight. As a result, NASA’s Inspector General projects that each SLS/Orion mission will cost over $4 billion. At that rate, there is no way NASA can afford to fly the behemoth more than once every year or two—certainly not enough to realize the Artemis plan of building a long-term lunar base. The entire project is “a national disgrace,” in the words of space analyst Casey Handmer. Few experts disagree.
The SLS program must be terminated. And there is every indication the Trump administration plans to do just that. The question is when. NASA’s current plan is to launch Artemis II, the first crewed SLS/Orion mission, in April 2026. That flight will carry four astronauts around the Moon and back to Earth. Artemis III, which aims to put astronauts on the lunar surface, is slated for mid-2027. That plan involves using SLS and Orion to put astronauts in lunar orbit, where they will dock with a SpaceX Starship which will then carry two astronauts to the lunar surface for a six-day stay. (Given the many delays in developing SLS and Orion, and the fact that Starship is still in the early test-flight stage, that date appears optimistic.)
NASA watchers believe some Trump advisors are pushing for an immediate cancellation of the entire SLS/Orion program. Assuming the new Trump team still sees returning to the moon as a top priority, cancelling SLS today would force NASA to cobble together a new mission plan relying entirely on SpaceX, or conceivably on a combination of private vendors. According to Ars Technica’s veteran space journalist Eric Berger, the Trump-appointed acting NASA administrator, Janet Petro, is arguing to keep SLS alive long enough to fly the Artemis II lunar return mission and the Artemis III Moon landing. While it is galling to rely on the overpriced and outdated SLS rocket for America’s initial return to the Moon, that appears to be the fastest approach to get American astronauts back to the lunar surface.
As of today, NASA’s Orion capsule is the only current spacecraft that has made a flight to the Moon and survived the high-speed re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. And SLS is the only rocket currently configured to launch Orion. Despite all the SLS/Orion project’s delays and uncertainties, it is highly unlikely that any other approach would get us to the lunar surface sooner. But, whether it retires SLS right away or after Artemis III, NASA should immediately begin developing other ways to carry cargo and astronauts to the Moon. One option would be to keep the Orion spacecraft but launch it and its upper stage in separate flights atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy or Blue Origin’s New Glenn heavy-lift rocket (which recently had a successful test flight). Another approach would involve putting fuel depots in orbit and then using a SpaceX Starship, or, conceivably, one of the other vehicles currently in development, to make the voyage from low-Earth orbit to the Moon.
It will likely take several years to develop a new lunar-mission plan that doesn’t rely on SLS. Still, if NASA and its commercial partners can make the case that one of these approaches will get us there faster, that would justify an even earlier SLS retirement. The key factor in making this decision is speed.
Putting U.S. boots on the lunar regolith again is urgent, not just for science or national prestige, but to maintain our geostrategic flexibility. Both the U.S. and China are planning to establish bases at the Moon’s South Pole. That unique region has deep craters that scientists believe contain pockets of water ice (valuable for making oxygen and fuel), and high points that enjoy continuous exposure to sunlight (and therefore access to power). Both advantages make the area promising for long-term habitation. But the region has limited sites that are suitable for building bases. It would be a mistake to allow China to establish a presence and then declare that valuable terrain off-limits to other nations. “If we do not beat the Chinese to the Moon, they are going to write the rules of the road up there,” Texas Republican Congressman Brian Babin, who chairs House Science, Space, and Technology Committee overseeing NASA, told Politico.
The role of Elon Musk is a wild card in these plans. Musk has long advocated colonizing Mars as a necessity for the human species. He is openly lobbying the White House to abandon the Artemis lunar program and head “straight to Mars,” as he said in a recent post on X. “The Moon is a distraction,” he added. It seems unlikely that the administration would entirely walk away from the signature space policy achievement of Trump’s first term (though, in today’s turbulent environment, anything is possible).
The current Moon plan has strong support on Capitol Hill, including from Babin and other key Republicans. And the Moon is a far more accessible goal, a three-day trip, as opposed to a roughly three-year mission to visit and return from Mars. But space analysts anticipate the administration might push for a more rapid pivot to Mars once a lunar toehold has been established. Asked for comment, a NASA spokesperson emailed, “NASA’s current Moon to Mars exploration approach calls for using missions on and around the Moon under the Artemis campaign to prepare for future human missions to Mars. We’re looking forward to hearing more about the Trump Administration’s plans for our agency and expanding exploration for the benefit of all, including sending American astronauts on the first human mission to the Red Planet.”
Improve and expand NASA’s commercial space operations. The SLS debacle shows that NASA’s traditional model for building rockets is broken. In that approach, NASA engineers design rockets and space vehicles, and then closely supervise the aerospace contractors hired to build the hardware that the agency will own and fly. Under these “cost-plus” contracts, contractors can pass added costs back to NASA—and ultimately to the taxpayers—whenever designs change or problems emerge. Obviously, such a system incentivizes cost overruns and delays.
Almost 20 years ago, frustrated NASA leaders began quietly experimenting with a different approach. They looked for commercial partners willing to build their own vehicles and use them to fly cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) for a fixed fee. In essence, NASA was proposing hiring privately owned rockets for spaceflight much the way fishing party might charter a boat.
SpaceX—then a scrappy little startup—made its first cargo delivery to the ISS in 2012 under this program. NASA’s effort soon expanded to include “Commercial Crew” flights approved to carry astronauts. Once SpaceX flew its first crewed flight to the ISS in 2020, Elon Musk’s groundbreaking company quickly became the agency’s only viable way to ferry astronauts to the station—and SpaceX did so for a small fraction of what NASA had spent on each space shuttle flight. NASA’s Commercial Crew program—despite opposition from many in Congress and some agency veterans—was eventually recognized as a spectacular success.
But NASA envisioned Commercial Crew as a program in which several private companies would compete for the agency’s business. When NASA launched the project, it offered Boeing—its longtime partner in building space hardware—a generous contract alongside SpaceX. Insiders assumed Boeing would blow away the competition. But Boeing struggled under the new fixed-price rules. Its new space vehicle, dubbed Starliner, encountered endless delays and cost overruns. In 2024, Starliner’s first crewed flight to the ISS turned into a fiasco when the craft suffered technical breakdowns and was eventually deemed unfit to carry its test-pilot crew back to Earth. Those two Starliner astronauts remain stranded at the space station today, and Boeing’s long reign as a spaceflight leader seems to be ending.
It’s revealing that SpaceX—with its lean startup culture—flourished under NASA’s tough fixed-price rules, while Boeing, a company accustomed to forgiving cost-plus contracts, did not. Boeing has said it will no longer accept fixed-price projects, as have other traditional aerospace giants. But NASA can’t simply go back to the days of cost-plus contracts. If the major legacy aerospace contractors refuse to work in NASA’s commercial programs, the agency will have to keep cultivating new vendors. That will be a challenge, partly because SpaceX has been so phenomenally successful.
Fortunately, other U.S. space companies are making progress. After years of delay, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin recently launched its partially reusable New Glenn rocket on a successful maiden flight. Other promising companies jostling for pieces of the launch and space services market include Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Firefly Aerospace, and Relativity Space. Just as it did during SpaceX’s early years, NASA is proactively offering commercial contracts to rising space ventures (including Blue Origin and Firefly) even as they work to prove their capabilities.
That’s the right strategy. Even if some companies fail or drop out—as some have—NASA will still come out ahead given the huge cost savings involved in fixed-price contracts. Fortunately, Trump’s team is committed to the commercial approach. But incoming administrator Isaacman will need all his entrepreneurial skills to keep NASA managers from putting too many demands on the agency’s commercial contractors.
Last year, the agency’s inspector general (IG) looked at a NASA project that offered fixed-price contracts to private companies willing to build and operate small lunar probes. The project has had mixed results, the IG found, partly because NASA managers imposed too many design changes on the relatively small vendors, making it hard for them to stick to their budgets and schedules. These “challenges will continue to hinder NASA’s ability to meet the initiative’s objectives,” the IG said. To make its fixed-price contracts work, NASA needs to develop a clear, limited set of design requirements and then let its vendors work out their own solutions.
Restructure NASA for an entrepreneurial age. With so many private companies building advanced spacecraft, NASA no longer has to do it all. By relying on commercial vendors to build and launch space vehicles, NASA can focus on what it does best: basic R&D, mission planning and management, and space science. Once it stops wasting billions on rockets that rarely fly, NASA will be able to send out many more missions—both crewed and robotic—across the solar system.
“NASA is in the midst of the biggest opportunity since its founding in 1958,” writes analyst Handmer. SpaceX’s revolutionary Starship is getting closer to commercial service, while Blue Origin and other launch companies compete to drive down the cost of putting cargo in orbit. “Being able to put mass in orbit cheaply solves so many problems,” space analyst Rand Simberg said in an interview. “If mass is cheap, we can do things we’ve dreamed of for 50 years.”
Since the dawn of spaceflight, NASA engineers have been held back by the enormous costs of launching hardware into space. When every gram is precious, engineers must design vehicles, space telescopes, or planetary rovers out of super lightweight materials, with exotic, one-off components. But when mass is cheap, space hardware can be built quickly out of ordinary materials, using off-the-shelf components. And, instead of launching a single Swiss-watch probe or rover, NASA can deploy whole swarms of simple, ruggedly made units. Lower costs will also allow private companies to launch orbiting fuel depots, small space stations, and other infrastructure that can serve the needs of both NASA and private industry.
Private companies will not only take over the basic tasks of launching NASA astronauts and space probes. They will also conduct their own exploratory missions and business ventures, including mining and tourism in space. In this more crowded environment, NASA will no longer be the sole, hegemonic leader in space flight. What should the agency’s role be in a world of many space players?
NASA should go back to basics. It should focus on the tasks that commercial operators can’t do as easily: basic research into space technology and new propulsion systems. It should continue studying ways to keep astronauts healthy in zero gravity, protected from radiation, and psychologically fit on long space voyages. NASA’s crewed missions should rely as much as possible on launch and other services provided by commercial vendors. But when NASA sends its astronauts to environments where private space companies cannot yet venture, it should structure those excursions as proof-of-concept missions. “NASA should not be in competition with private companies,” space advocate Glenn Reynolds advises. “It should only do directly those things—like deep space probes—that private companies can’t do yet, and it should yield territory as those companies progress.”
America’s boldest days in space are still ahead. The Trump administration’s challenge will be to fix NASA’s glaring problems without carelessly driving away the agency’s supporters or creating further delays in its missions. With disciplined leadership, and a willingness to break with the past, NASA can still pioneer the coming revolution in space.
Top Photo by Heritage Space/Heritage Images/Getty Images
