Trump pledges ‘golden age’ of space travel

President Donald Trump has announced ambitious plans to propel US space travel to new heights, including missions to Mars and the Moon, the White House reported on Thursday.

The United States is locked in a fierce competition with China to achieve a lunar landing before 2030, more than half a century after the first humans set foot on the Moon. The administration's policy aims to reignite America's position in space transportation, with the goal of conducting over 1,000 launches and reentries on US soil each year by the end of the decade.

In a memorandum released on Thursday, Trump urged NASA to foster commercial transportation to and from the Moon, facilitate commercial robotic access to Mars, and explore commercial avenues for sending humans to and from Mars. To achieve these objectives, NASA is already working on establishing a lunar surface base and plans to utilize robotic vehicles to construct the necessary infrastructure for future human explorers.

The president also encouraged private investment in US space exploration and called for identifying additional launch and landing sites for spacecraft. NASA is set to test an in-orbit rendezvous between its spacecraft and a lunar lander by 2027, a feat that tech billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are competing to achieve with their respective companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Musk, the founder of SpaceX in 2002, has a grand vision of ferrying humans to Mars and establishing colonies on the neighboring planet.