Donald Trump’s Space Plans: Wants NASA To Focus On Mars And Europa

President-elect Donald Trump reportedly wants to restart the programs under NASA to send astronauts on Mars and start numerous missions to Jupiter's moon Europa, something that was canceled by his predecessor.

As per reports, Trump wants to focus on getting rid of bureaucratic waste as well as cut back on environmental science research so that the American space agency can go forward with more ambitious plans of sending humans to the Red Planet and robots to Europa, which incidentally have been identified as two of the best places for finding alien life-forms.

According to Washington Post, the Republican Representative from Oklahoma Jim Bridenstine will in all possibility lead NASA. Bridenstine is one of the main advocates for human space exploration for Congress. The new programs under the Trump government could also help companies in mining resourceful minerals from the asteroid belt. Furthermore, NASA's mission around low-Earth orbit could be handed over to private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Orbital AK.

"NASA should be focused primarily on deep-space activities rather than Earth-centric work that is better handled by other agencies," said Peter Navarro and Robert S. Walker, senior advisers to the Trump campaign, according to Space News. "Human exploration of our entire solar system by the end of this century should be NASA's focus and goal."

As per industry analysts, Trump could also increase the overall budget for NASA, at the same time doing away with various other programs supported by President Barack Obama such as the Asteroid Redirect Mission, money from which can be diverted to Mars exploration mission.

In addition, Trump could also cut the more than $2 billion fund the space agency spends on Earth Science Mission Directorate that focuses on improving weather prediction and climate modeling and covers global warming science.

At the moment, functions such as space technology and astrophysics under NASA are getting only $826.7 million and $781.5, respectively.