Since Donald Trump became president in January there has been much speculation about his future space policy. Will he declare the moon his goal, and task NASA to take astronauts there? Or will he aim higher, doubling down on the push for Mars that NASA has been selling for the past six years? Or will he leave the exploration to private companies and citizens while squeezing NASA's budget into irrelevancy?
None of these choices are actually good ones. All repeat presidents' failures since the 1960s to accomplish anything very striking in space. Since John F. Kennedy, subsequent presidents from Nixon to Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Obama have all copied Kennedy, making a Kennedy-like space speech that committed the nation to some wonderful space goal by some significant date.
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