Trump Administration Science & Technology Highlights: Year One, Office of Science and Technology Policy
Keith’s notice: right here is an excerpt on house from Trump Administration Science & Technology Highlights: Year One, Office of Science and Technology Policy, pages 49-55 – (excerpt below).
Space
“With our incredible Guardians in the U.S. Space Force protecting America’s interests in space, we are securing the systems that power exploration, defense, and communication. We are building strength, expanding freedom, and ensuring that the American flag remains the ultimate symbol of leadership across the final frontier.” – President Donald J. Trump, July 20, 2025
Space is the final word excessive floor for America’s nationwide safety, prosperity, and scientific management. From GPS to communication networks to missile-warning programs, space-based belongings shield our homeland, provide conveniences for every-day life, and underpin a lot of our fashionable financial system. At the identical time, house represents boundless alternative: new frontiers for exploration, new industries and applied sciences ready to be born, and new discoveries that can develop the boundaries of human information.
Building on actions taken in his first Administration, President Trump is as soon as once more placing renewed emphasis on making certain American superiority in house exploration, protection, and financial improvement. In January 2025 President Trump issued Executive Order 14186, “The Iron Dome for America,” calling for a next-generation missile protection protect that can embrace a key factor of utilizing space-based belongings to detect and intercept assaults in opposition to the United States. The Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 Administration Research and Development Budget Priorities and Cross-Cutting Actions memo, launched in September 2025, requires R&D investments to guarantee America’s continued house dominance for each civilian and protection mission wants that prioritize bold targets, unlock new mission capabilities, allow discoveries, and obtain exploration objectives. On December 18, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14369, “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” which requires an area coverage that can prolong the attain of human discovery, safe the Nation’s very important financial and safety pursuits, unleash industrial improvement, and lay the muse for a brand new house age.
President Trump has lengthy considered house as important to the longer term of the United States. In his first Presidential Administration, he took a quantity of steps to resume U.S. management in house exploration, together with issuing a sequence of Space Policy Directives: SPD-1 Reinvigorating America’s Human Space Exploration Program (2017), SPD-2 Streamlining Regulations on Commercial Use of Space (2018), SPD-3 National Space Traffic Management Policy (2018), SPD-4 Establishment of the United States Space Force (2019), SPD-5 Cybersecurity Principles for Space Systems (2020), SPD-6 National Strategy for Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion (2020), and SPD-7 U.S. Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Policy (2021). Specific achievements within the Trump 45 Administration embrace re-establishing the National Space Council, directing NASA to embark on a journey again to the Moon, the primary all- lady spacewalk, the primary crewed launch to the International Space Station from American soil in a commercially-built and operated American crew spacecraft, reaching new frontiers within the robotic exploration of the Solar System (together with launch of the Mars Perseverance Rover and the Parker Solar Probe), and the discharge, from the New Horizons mission, of the primary detailed picture of essentially the most distant object ever explored within the photo voltaic system—the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule
Highlights
Space Exploration
Enabling a Meaningful and Sustained Presence on the Moon. The December 2025 Executive Order on “Ensuring American Space Superiority” refocuses America’s house program to decide to a lunar floor touchdown by 2028, in addition to establishing the preliminary parts of a everlasting lunar outpost by 2030. These efforts will lay the foundations of lunar financial improvement, put together for the journey to Mars, and encourage the subsequent technology of American explorers. The Executive Order additionally requires defending America’s nationwide and financial safety pursuits in, from, and to house, for the primary time articulating that America will detect, characterize, and counter threats to U.S. pursuits from very low-Earth orbit by cislunar house, together with any adversary placement of a nuclear weapon in house. It additionally kicks off a National Initiative to focus the facility of American innovation to develop nuclear reactors for house purposes. The Order requires nuclear energy demonstrations on the Moon and in house, together with a lunar floor reactor prepared for launch by 2030.
Getting Artemis II Ready to Send Americans Around the Moon. The Artemis Program is returning Americans to the Moon. Started by President Trump in his first time period, the Nation is embarking on an thrilling journey to ship Americans across the Moon in 2026 for the primary crewed Artemis mission. This will reaffirm our dedication to house exploration and ship a transparent sign to the world that America is as soon as once more main the way in which to the celebrities. NASA not too long ago accomplished stacking of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for Artemis II. Teams built-in parts manufactured throughout the nation at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, together with the rocket’s boosters and core stage, in addition to Orion’s stage adapter and launch abort system. The Artemis II crew participated in additional than 30 mission simulations alongside groups on the bottom, making certain that the crew and launch, flight, and restoration groups are ready for any scenario which will come up through the take a look at flight. Soon, crew will don their survival fits and get strapped into Orion throughout a countdown demonstration take a look at, serving as a costume rehearsal for launch day. NASA labored with the Department of War to conduct a week-long underway restoration take a look at in preparation to securely acquire the Artemis II astronauts after they splash down following their mission.
Expanding the Artemis Accords to Promote Peaceful Space Exploration. The Department of State led diplomatic and public diplomacy efforts to strengthen U.S. management in house exploration, purposes, and commercialization by rising understanding of, and help for, U.S. nationwide house insurance policies and packages and to encourage the overseas use of U.S. house capabilities, programs, and providers. In 2020, in President Trump’s first time period, the U.S. launched the Artemis Accords to information civil house exploration and use within the twenty first century. In the final 12 months, eight nations signed on together with Finland, Bangladesh, Senegal, Hungary, the Philippines, Portugal, Norway, Malaysia, bringing the whole to 60 signatories.
Deepening Bilateral Space Collaborations. In 2025, the U.S. hosted bilateral convenings to reaffirm enduring partnerships and commitments to the accountable and peaceable makes use of and exploration of outer house, together with with Argentina, the Republic of Korea (ROK), the E.U., and Italy, and signed a brand new bilateral house framework settlement with Australia. The fourth U.S.-ROK Civil Space Dialogue, hosted by the U.S. on April 14, strengthened the U.S.-ROK Alliance by house exploration cooperation on Artemis and different missions, and facilitated ROK investments in capabilities that help shared objectives in Moon and Mars exploration. In September 2025, the U.S. hosted the thirteenth U.S.-E.U. Space Dialogue to advance shared house priorities, together with addressing space-related safety threats and promote innovation by leveraging cutting-edge industrial capabilities in help of U.S. and E.U. house actions. The Positioning, Navigation, and Timing working group continued its efforts to advertise compatibility and non-interference between GPS and the E.U.’s Galileo programs. The Copernicus Coordination Group shared how a mutually useful relationship between satellite tv for pc programs permits each the United States and the E.U. to ascertain state-of-the-art observing programs at a decrease price to taxpayers, enabling consumer communities to learn from extra knowledge, elevated forecast accuracy, and higher timeliness and robustness of the observing programs.
Sustaining 25 Years of Continuous Human Presence on the International Space Station (ISS). 2025 marked the twenty fifth consecutive 12 months of steady human presence in America’s orbiting laboratory. This exceptional achievement was made potential by the profound capability of America’s house workforce to securely construct, function, and preserve essentially the most advanced spacecraft in historical past. While earlier administrations allowed our focus to float, the Trump Administration has taken decisive motion to make sure America’s full dominance in house. Under the Executive Order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” President Trump has renewed America’s dedication to a thriving industrial market in low-Earth orbit and a pathway to interchange the Station by 2030.
Commercial Space
Promoting Commercial Space Innovation by Reducing Regulatory Barriers and Enhancing Coordination. On August 13, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14335 “Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry,” which eliminates wasteful or duplicative laws which have lengthy inhibited innovation within the industrial house business. The Order elevates the Office of Space Commerce to an unbiased workplace within the Department of Commerce, giving the industrial house business long-overdue visibility. The Order additionally reforms the method for authorizing novel house actions, requiring the Secretary of Commerce to suggest a course of for mission authorizations for actions lined beneath Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. This lengthy overdue motion will present regulatory certainty and investor confidence for brand new and authentic industrial house ventures.
Celebrating a Record Year for Space Launches. In 2025, there have been a document 176 profitable orbital house launches from the United States, together with a document 109 launches from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station – Kennedy Space Center vary advanced. Under the Executive Orders “Ensuring American Space Superiority” and “Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry,” President Trump recommits America to a path of house dominance and industrial house management, eradicating boundaries to launch and creating new incentive buildings to construct house infrastructure. These actions be certain that America stays the house superpower.
Space Security
Building a Big Beautiful Golden Dome to Protect the Homeland. The January 2025 Executive Order “Iron Dome for America” commits the nation to ship a homeland missile protection structure to answer the catastrophic threats of superior missiles and aerial assaults. President Trump’s Peace Through Strength imaginative and prescient was codified within the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, placing a $24.4 billion down cost for built-in air and missile protection that can guarantee America’s safety for generations to come back. The President took additional motion beneath the Executive Order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” calling for demonstration of protype next-generation missile protection applied sciences by 2028. The DOW acquisition group has quickly realigned the nation’s missile protection R&D efforts with the Golden Dome plan; the primary set of awards for space-based missile interceptors have been awarded in November 2025. In December, MDA awarded extra Scalable Homeland Innovation Enterprise Layered Defense contracts that can advance our homeland missile protection capabilities.
Completing Ten Launches to Support our Nation’s Decisive Intelligence Advantage. The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) launched 10 missions in 2025, together with a number of launches of NRO’s proliferated structure. This constellation continues so as to add functionality and resilience to our intelligence mission by shorter revisit occasions, elevated observational persistence, and quicker processing and transmission of knowledge. Over the final two years, NRO has launched greater than 200 satellites, creating the biggest and most succesful authorities constellation in orbit in our nation’s historical past.
Rebuilding America’s Military Might in Space. In 2025, the United States Space Force (USSF) launched a number of missions, together with the primary tranche of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture Tracking Layer satellites. In May 2025, the Space Force additionally launched the eighth GPS III satellite tv for pc, enhancing the Nation’s resilience for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) providers. The USSF launched a number of analysis and improvement satellites, together with the Navigation Technology Satellite 3 testbed, which can de-risk new resilient PNT capabilities, the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle with a number of onboard experiments, and the STP-S30 mission in partnership with NASA to exhibit the novel DiskSat structure.
Inaugurating a New Era in Space Domain Awareness. On September 30, 2025, the United States Space Force introduced the operational acceptance of the Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis System (ATLAS), revitalizing an growing old and labor-intensive functionality with fashionable and agile practices to allow navy readiness in an more and more congested house surroundings. ATLAS permits the Space Force to guarantee spaceflight security and observe, attribute, and reply to adversary actions in house, make sure the accountable use of house by all events, and allow U.S. freedom of motion in all orbital regimes. ATLAS is meant to ultimately take away operational dependencies on the greater than 30-year-old legacy Space Defense Operations Center (SPADOC) system and can present a modernized and built-in system that permits responsive and resilient capabilities for house operations facilities.
Planetary Defense: Protecting the Earth and Humanity from Natural Disasters. In protection of Earth and defending humanity, NASA has continued to observe a near-Earth object that triggered potential affect notifications. Scientists have labored to calculate extra exact affect fashions, noting that the asteroid, which poses no important risk to Earth, has solely a 0.0004% likelihood of hitting our planet. Work continued on the NASA Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, anticipated to launch in 2027, and is designed to assist advance the Nation’s means to find and characterize most of the doubtless hazardous asteroids and comets that come inside 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit.
Space Science
Pursuing Science and Technology Demonstrations on and Around the Moon. NASA chosen a number of science research for the Artemis II mission, together with efforts that target astronaut well being, in addition to these that can present perception for mission planning and web site choice for future lunar missions. Experiments and know-how demonstrations aboard the Commercial Lunar Payload Services flights included an electrodynamic mud protect, a lunar navigation system, high-performance computing, and assortment of greater than 9,000 first-of- a-kind pictures of the lunar lander’s engine plumes. NASA groups have studied regolith (lunar grime and rocks) in a simulated lunar gravity surroundings and examined how strong supplies catch hearth in house. The company’s 55-pound CubeSat in lunar orbit, CAPSTONE, exceeded 1,000 days in house, serving as a testbed for autonomous navigation and in-space communications. NASA revealed findings from an Artemis I experiment highlighting why inexperienced algae could also be an excellent deep house journey companion.
Improving Our Understanding of the Sun and Space Weather. In 2025, NASA, NOAA, and mission companions launched an armada of 5 important house climate missions: Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH), Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites (TRACERS), Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and Space Weather Follow On – Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1). This historic achievement will advance the state of heliophysics science and ship operational readiness for house climate hazards. Together, these missions will allow us to know the mysteries of the Sun, in addition to shield America’s energy grid, our satellites, and our manner of life from the devastating results of photo voltaic storms. In May 2025, scientists on the U.S. National Science Foundation National Solar Observatory and the New Jersey Institute of Technology used a brand new optical system to seize essentially the most detailed pictures up to now of the advanced actions within the solar’s environment, the corona. This know-how will enable scientists to higher perceive the intense nature of the corona and produce pc fashions that extra precisely predict house climate and potential Earth-impacting photo voltaic flares. In addition, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe group shared new pictures of the Sun’s environment, taken nearer to the star than ever captured earlier than.
Enabling Discovery On- and Off-Planet. In 2025, NASA launched a number of historic science missions. The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar is the biggest joint U.S.-India collaborative science venture up to now, and can present breathtaking radar imagery of Earth’s floor to allow discoveries of our residence planet. NASA additionally launched the SPHEREx all-sky infrared survey telescope, which can seize 450 million galaxies together with over 100 million stars within the Milky Way with a purpose to discover the origins of the universe, in addition to the ESCAPADE mission to review the Martian environment and real-time response to photo voltaic wind, enabling future missions to the Red Planet. ESCAPADE was launched on a Blue Origin New Glenn Rocket, marking the primary time the corporate has efficiently recovered a booster stage, and gathering knowledge to certify the mission for future nationwide safety payloads.
Coordinating a Solar System-Wide Observation Campaign. Garnering important curiosity this 12 months, NASA has coordinated a photo voltaic system-wide statement marketing campaign to comply with comet 3I/ATLAS, the third identified interstellar object to go by our photo voltaic system. To date, 12 NASA spacecraft and space-based telescopes have captured and processed imagery of the comet since its discovery in the summertime.
Promoting Progress in Astrobiology. NASA’s Perseverance rover discovered a pattern on Mars that probably incorporates biosignatures, substances or buildings that may have a organic origin however require extra knowledge and learning earlier than any conclusions could be reached concerning the absence or presence of life. NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars discovered the biggest natural compounds on the Red Planet up to now. Teams are also working to develop applied sciences for the Habitable Worlds Observatory; the company now has tallied 6,000 exoplanets. Samples from asteroid Bennu revealed sugars, amino acids, and different life-building molecules.
Releasing Unprecedented Images of the Southern Sky. In June 2025, the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a significant new scientific facility on a mountaintop in Chile collectively funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, launched its first imagery. The observatory will repeatedly conduct a survey of the southern sky to create a ten- 12 months document of the cosmos from our vantage. In simply over 10 hours of take a look at observations, Rubin captured thousands and thousands of galaxies and Milky Way stars and 1000’s of asteroids. The imagery is a small preview of Rubin Observatory’s upcoming scientific mission to discover and perceive some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.
Building a Flagship Observatory and Telescope. Assembly of NASA’s subsequent flagship observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is accomplished, with ultimate testing underway. The telescope will assist reply questions on darkish vitality and exoplanets and can be able to launch as early as fall of 2026. The company’s latest working flagship telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, now in its third 12 months, continued to rework our understanding of the universe, and Hubble celebrated its thirty fifth 12 months with a 2.5- gigapixel Andromeda galaxy mosaic.