President Donald Trump’s second inaugural address was filled with equal parts soaring rhetoric about the future and snarky condemnation of his predecessor. An example of the former concerned the president’s space policy.

“And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”

The sentence was conspicuous for its lack of mention of the moon. The Artemis program, which Trump initiated during his first term, was quite clear that humans would be returning to the moon first, before going to Mars.

However, SpaceX’s Elon Musk is now one of the president’s closest advisors. Musk has made no secret of his desire to establish a settlement on Mars. He has even claimed that he can send the first people there in 2028. That assertion has, no doubt, excited the imagination of the president, hence his statement about putting the American flag on the Red Planet.

So, is NASA still going to the moon, or is the Trump administration preparing to abandon the moon and send astronauts straight to Mars?

Trump’s pledge to go to Mars without mentioning the moon has caused some head-scratching and even consternation in the media. A story in Phys.org notes that Musk has posted on X, “We're going straight to Mars. The moon is a distraction.”

The story also says that........

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