What Trump Said

If you look at our facilities, they were virtually closed up. There was crabgrass growing on the runways. And now they’re vital and we’re — we’re doing — we’re going to Mars. We’re stopping at the moon.

False.

President Trump, like some of his predecessors, has retooled the government’s space program. But space exploration had not grinded to a halt before he took office in 2017. In fact, NASA for years has been aiming for a trip to Mars.

Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes space exploration, said that the Trump administration “has been unusually attentive to space” but noted that it has “generally continued policies established over the past 15 years, and benefited from a rapidly maturing commercial space industry that has taken decades to develop.”

In 2004, President George W. Bush proposed a return to the moon as a springboard to Mars. President Barack Obama canceled that moon program in 2010, choosing to focus instead on reaching an asteroid and then Mars, while encouraging government financing of commercial spaceflight.

Mr. Trump has since scrapped the asteroid idea and refocused on the moon, eyeing a 2024 landing (however unlikely) as the interim step before reaching Mars. He also restored the National Space Council, “which has taken significant steps to propose updates to regulations around the commercial use of space and space traffic management,” Mr. Dreier said. And most recently, Mr. Trump authorized the creation of the United States Space Command, a precursor to the military Space Force he often champions.