Donald Trump’s legacy may be written on the high frontier of space

A hundred years from now, long after imbroglios over impeachment, immigration, and mean tweets are forgotten by everyone except historians, President Trump’s legacy will be defined by two decisions that were made in 2019.

The Trump administration set 2024 as the year Americans return to the moon. He signed a defense bill that established the United States Space Force as a new branch of the military. No two decisions he will or can make will shape the future in such profound ways as these.

The Trump administration set the goal of returning to the moon in late 2017. However, the Artemis program had scheduled the first moon boots on the lunar soil in over five decades for 2028, setting a leisurely pace.

On March 26. 2019, Vice President Mike Pence announced that 2024 would be the year of the next moon landing. The decision came as a shock to Congressional, Democrats, who had just seized control of the House and thus more of a say in space policy. Many, looking at the $25 billion or so extra price tag for getting the “first woman and the next man” on the moon within the hypothetical second term of Donald Trump smelled politics. Clearly the decision was a ploy to allow Trump a history-making achievement to cap his presidency. Those critics missed two points.

No matter the date of the next moonwalk, no matter who is president when it occurs, Trump will take credit, as he should. He signed the executive order. He and those working for him, like Pence and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, will have worked tirelessly to make the American return to the moon happen. Just as Apollo was President John F. Kennedy’s defining achievement long after he died, Artemis will be Trump’s even if it occurs after his presidency.

The decision to return to the moon by 2024 was made to avoid the ADD that stranded the last two efforts to return to the moon, both undertaken by Presidents Bush. Making the date of the moon landing five years in the future will focus the minds of NASA, its international and commercial partners, and those in Congress who must fund and oversee the effort.

Congress agreed by voting funds to develop a crewed lunar lander, just not as much as NASA says it needs. Bridenstine, relentlessly optimistic, took a glass-is-half-full attitude and vowed to get the rest of the money.

Trump also made the decision, confirmed by Congress, was the creation of a United States Space Force. Once derided as science fiction, the logic of a space war-fighting service branch, in an era during which space satellites are crucial both to America’s national security and economic vitality, was irresistible. The Space Force is starting with a modest budget and a mandate to develop a structure and a mission.

The decisions to return to the moon quickly and to create the Space Force point to a future in which humankind will live and work in space on a regular, permanent basis. A century from now people will live on the moon and Mars, exploiting the natural resources of the Earth’s nearest neighbor and of the asteroids, and creating products on space-based manufacturing facilities. Humans will be a multi-planet species, thus ensuring that no planetary catastrophe will end our species. The Space Force will be around to keep the peace. President Donald Trump will have assured that those humans and that Space Force will include Americans and their allies.

Space is supposed to be nonpartisan. Few people in Congress oppose a return to the moon or of a Space Force. But no one can imagine either happening if Americans elect a president who favors a Green New Deal and Medicare for All. The immense amount of money those things will require will preclude even the modest funding needed to make a space-faring, multi-planet civilization become a reality. Indeed, the mindset that would make the United States a socialist republic is antithetical to the idea of an expansive, interplanetary humanity. The fact makes the 2020 election the most important of the current century, deciding whether we will have a civilization without limits or one that is defined by limits.