President Donald Trump announced that he wants America to explore Mars as part of the next Moon mission. The Democratic party showed its dedication to nitpicking by reminding Trump the Moon is “not part of Mars.”
“For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon – We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science,” Trump tweeted on Friday.
Coming from a background in real estate and casinos, Trump is obviously not an astronomer. Still, the president couldn’t have possibly assumed that the Moon and Mars were somehow the same. Nevertheless, the Democratic National Committee fired up the snark machine and let loose an official statement at Trump: “The moon is not part of Mars.”
A parade of liberal journalists and commentators groaned along, the context sailing over their heads and into the stratosphere.
Joking aside, Trump’s statement was almost certainly referring to the president’s belief that any mission to the moon should be undertaken as part of a bigger push to Mars. In fact, just one month earlier, Trump set out his vision with his trademark modesty, promising to “return to Space in a BIG WAY!”
Friday’s tweet too came within minutes of NASA’s Chief Financial Officer Jeff DeWit telling Fox News that after establishing a “sustainable presence” on the Moon, “we will, in the 2030s, be going to Mars.”
To that end, Trump proposed a $1.6 billion bump in NASA’s 2020 budget last month, to go towards putting humans back on the Moon in 2024. The space agency currently has a yearly budget of $21.5 billion, or 0.49 percent of the entire US budget. At the height of the space race against the Soviet Union in 1966, NASA consumed 4.41 percent of the US budget.
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