Trump campaign releases nationalistic second term agenda featuring permanent manned moon presence

Mike Pence has long been charged with boosting enthusiasm for reinvigorated US space programme

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign released a list of priorities for his next four years in office, if he wins them – and it includes both a trip to Mars and a “permanent manned presence on the Moon”.

The long bullet-pointed list, released on Sunday, comes after several interviews in which Mr Trump struggled to provide even the simplest details of what he would do with a second term.

Covering policy areas ranging from the standard education, healthcare and jobs to the distinctively Trumpian “Drain the Swamp”, the agenda presents itself as a statement of the president’s “core priorities”. However, there are some notable gaps.

Missing entirely, for instance, are climate change and renewable energy sources; while energy independence does feature, it is to be pursued by a “deregulatory agenda” – which on the basis of the first Trump term would presumably mean relaxing emissions standards and allowing drilling for oil and gas in hitherto protected areas such as national parks.

Other plans are more overtly nationalistic. Schools will be ordered to “teach American exceptionalism”; the US’s “unrivalled military strength” will be maintained and expanded, and the administration will “drain the globalist swamp by taking on international organizations that hurt American citizens”.

The agenda is merely a summary, and does not spell out how any of its goals will be achieved. Nonetheless, on the eve of the Republican National Convention – and with the party deciding not to write a new policy platform this year – it remains the most detailed account yet of what Mr Trump would do if re-elected.

The space race side of the agenda, however, has been a part of the Trump manifesto for several years now, though not always in such bold terms.

Vice president Mike Pence called for a permanent moon presence in a speech in 2018. “While our sights are once again set on our lunar neighbour,” he told an audience at Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre, “this time we’re not content with just leaving behind footprints. Or even to leave at all.

“The time has come, we really believe, for the United States of America to take what we have learned over these so many decades, put your ingenuity and creativity to work, and establish a permanent presence around and on the moon.”

Nasa this spring unveiled early plans for a lunar “base camp”, part of the “Artemis” programme that also includes a new space station circling the Moon called the Lunar Orbit Platform-Gateway.

There is a political element to the US’s spacefaring ambitions, in particular the urge to counter China’s aspirations to become a major space power with manned missions pushing the boundaries of what has already been achieved.

The recent launch of American astronauts using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and crew module marked the first time since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011 that the US has mounted a space mission without using internationally sourced craft.

A crewed Mars mission, meanwhile, would have to overcome multiple obstacles, including solar radiation and the physiological implications of months or longer spent in low gravity.