To infinity and beyond: Trump has big plans for Nasa – but is it just a fantasy?

The world is not enough for Donald Trump: he has declared space “the next great American frontier” and mused to Congress that “American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream”.

Earlier this month, the president ordered the agency to head back to the moon. “This time we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday to many other worlds beyond,” he said, before signing the new policy for Nasa.

The potential moon mission harkens back to policy under George W Bush, who in 2004 asked the agency to “gain a new foothold” there. His successor, Barack Obama, prioritized instead a 2030s mission to Mars, a program that has inched along due to its relatively low levels of funding.

Trump’s proposals leave many questions unanswered – a timeline, budget, specific goals and methods – and space policy experts expressed cautious optimism tempered by deep skepticism about the details.

“It could be a significant, almost historic step – if it is followed through,” said John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University and founder of the Space Policy Institute. “The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is whether there is meaningful funding.”

For years, Nasa has worked on a deep space capsule and its Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket it has ever developed, with Mars in mind, although its current plan included a hypothetical pit stop in lunar orbit – the Deep Space Gateway, a space station that could be used as a staging post for deep space missions or landing on the moon’s surface.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Space Launch System’s booster in Promontory, Utah. Photograph: Bill Ingalls/AP

Casey Dreier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society, an advocacy group, said that Nasa can adjust its plans to focus squarely on landing on the moon, but that “space policy is a big ship to turn”.

He added: “It ultimately comes down to: what do you want to get out of the moon? Maybe you can get water out of the surface and get rocket fuel out of it and it can be a fueling depot. But it’s like building a gas station in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness before you’ve even built a road. There is no pre-existing business model on the moon.”

Nasa will have at least some competition. China has sent three robotic landers to the moon since 2007, with more in mind, and Moon Express, a private American venture aiming to win a $30m prize offered by Google, has a 2018 launch date and ambitions to mine the moon.

But would-be space entrepreneurs have run into regulatory hurdles, namely the Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, which holds that no country can claim a celestial body, and that governments supervise non-governmental organizations – like businesses – in space. In 2015, Obama signed a law that gave companies “space resource rights”, and earlier this year members of Congress proposed creating an “Office of Space Commerce”. But for now the legislation, like hopes to mine asteroids, remains far ahead of the actual technology.

Like Bush and Obama before him, Trump has encouraged private companies to fill the gaps. SpaceX and Blue Origin, owned by billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos respectively, are developing their own “heavy” rockets and space tourism programs. In February, Musk announced that two private citizens had bought tickets for a flight around the moon in 2018, though SpaceX has never flown a crewed mission or tested its heavy rocket. The first test flight is set for January, and a spokeswoman declined to give any new details about the moon mission.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Dragon spacecraft launches from Cape Canaveral earlier this month. Photograph: AP

But Congress, which sets Nasa’s budget, holds most of the power over Nasa’s ambitions – and moon base dreams require moon base money. After John F Kennedy’s call to put astronauts on the moon, Nasa received an 89% budget increase; the agency spent about $207bn, adjusted for inflation, across the Apollo missions.

The agency’s current budget has hovered around $19bn a year recently – about 0.5% of federal spending, compared to 24% spent on social security and 15% on defense.

“We could spend a penny instead of half a penny and would get a lot more,” said Alan Steinberg, a political scientist at Rice University who studies Nasa policy. But while Kennedy could appeal to cold war sentiment, he said, “now it’s really hard for any administration, Republican or Democrat, to justify space funding.”

The experts are not holding their breath. “It’s very easy to sign a statement and it’s something different to implement it,” said Marcia Smith, an editor at the journal Space Policy. “They’ve always fallen flat in the long run.”

Part of the problem is timing, Steinberg said: missions take years.

“Even if Trump says, ‘We’re going to Mars, this is gonna happen,’ it’s not going to happen under him,” he said. “Given the amount that any politician is concerned with credit, I think you get the same kind of problems with big spending for space.”

Congress is expected to finalize its 2019 budget in February. In the meantime, Nasa has no confirmed administrator or deputy administrator. The Senate has stalled for weeks over Trump’s pick to lead Nasa, the Republican congressman Jim Bridenstine.

If confirmed, the socially conservative politician, who has criticized spending on climate change research, would be the first elected official to be named administrator, and the rare Nasa head without a career in science or with the agency. But the Senate has yet to vote, and at least one Republican, Marco Rubio, vocally opposes him.

Trump has proposed cuts to earth sciences and canceled an asteroid mission, but many of Nasa’s other plans are still in place. Missions like the James Webb Space Telescope remain works in progress, and next summer the agency will launch a new Mars lander, to study the planet’s interior, as well as a car-sized spacecraft to fly into the atmosphere of the sun. In August, a spacecraft called Osiris Rex should arrive at the asteroid Bennu, where it aims to retrieve about two ounces of asteroid to bring back to earth.

Meanwhile the Kepler spacecraft is still hunting new planets, and the Voyager and New Horizon vessels are cruising into the farthest reaches that humanity has ever explored. Science advocates like Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, have continued to press the president to support space exploration.

“Infinity and beyond!” Aldrin joked to the president in June.

“This is infinity here,” Trump replied. “It could be infinity. We don’t really don’t know. But it could be. It has to be something. But it could be infinity, right?”