Buried in the 870 pages of the One Big Beautiful Bill, there is a concession to Republican representatives from states closely linked to the manned space exploration program, which was facing massive layoffs and unprecedented cuts. Another victim of this concession is the tycoon Elon Musk, as Trump’s decision takes away lucrative contracts for his space rockets. Europe, on the other hand, is breathing a sigh of relief.
The law recently approved by Congress revives Gateway, the future space station that will orbit the Moon. The federal government will spend $2.6 billion on this manned base, the construction of which also involves the European Space Agency (ESA) along with Canada, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. The measure is a sharp U-turn from what Trump was proposing just over a month ago: to completely cancel the project and leave all its international partners in the lurch.
Something similar is happening with the Space Launch System (SLS), with which the U.S. government aims to send the first woman astronaut to the Moon in 2027. The BBB will ultimately include more than $4 billion to fund at least two additional flights with this launch vehicle, beyond those already planned for the Artemis 2 and 3 missions. Trump’s original idea was to eliminate it after these two flights and perhaps resort to the Starship being developed by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company. But this latter system is far from ready to carry astronauts, and has already accumulated several spectacular explosions, the last of them before even attempting takeoff.
Furthermore, the clash between the U.S. president and the tycoon is increasingly evident. Musk has announced that he will create a political party in the United States to steal voters from Trump. The president has called it “ridiculous” and described Musk as a “train wreck.” The president has also threatened to withdraw important public contracts held by Musk’s companies such as SpaceX and the electric car manufacturer Tesla.
Trump had bought into Musk’s idea of sending astronauts to Mars as soon as possible, a very different option than the one the U.S. space agency had been planning for years. The new funding returns to the original vision of first sending astronauts to the Moon, building an orbital station there, and recovering the Orion capsules for the Artemis 4 and 5 missions, formally planned for 2028 and 2030, which will also be transported by SLS rockets, which both Trump and Musk had criticized as too expensive and obsolete.
One of the big winners from these measures is Europe, which had watched with horror as many of the joint programs it had invested the most money and effort in were threatened with cancellation. The European Space Agency (ESA), for example, is responsible for building a habitation module for the future Gateway lunar station, as well as a storage module, a fuel depot, and the only place in the entire facility with windows, through which astronauts can look out to contemplate the lunar surface and outer space. Europe will also benefit from the extended life of the Orion spacecraft, for which it manufactures the service module that provides power and propulsion.
Trump’s mega-law also includes a significant injection of $1.2 billion in funding for the International Space Station (ISS) until 2029, before its retirement the following year. This is also key for Europe, as it could ensure that European astronauts, including the Spaniard Pablo Álvarez, can travel to space before 2030.
An uninhabited space station
“If the United States pulled out of Gateway, the project would be dead,” acknowledges an executive from one of Europe’s leading aerospace companies. “Europe could have completed the station on its own, but for the time being, it doesn’t have access to space for its astronauts; it relies on Russian Soyuz spacecraft or commercial U.S. spacecraft, so what we were facing was having an uninhabited space station on the Moon,” he explains.
The main reason the United States has decided to increase funding for the ISS is geopolitical, these sources point out. China has an Earth orbital station, and it would be a complete defeat if the “Western world” didn’t have a similar facility, the ISS, or a larger one, the Gateway, when it’s ready later this decade.
On the other hand, nobody can save NASA’s robotic exploration missions and other scientific programs, which are facing unprecedented cuts. Trump’s budget only includes increases for manned exploration programs, but in return, he will cut the science budget in half. This will force the cancellation of 41 projects, including 19 active space missions.
The person responsible for this major change of tack is Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and who is believed to have pushed for the new funds to prevent the hundreds of layoffs that Trump’s policies would have caused in his state.
“It’s been a lightning-fast change of direction, perhaps the fastest I’ve ever seen in this field,” Casey Dreier, head of space policy at the Planetary Society of the United States, told this newspaper. However, the expert at this non-profit organization founded by Carl Sagan in 1980 believes the scope of the new law is “disappointing” because it doesn’t include any relief from the planned cuts to science, education, and other areas. This is also explained by politics. “By an accident of history, NASA’s human space exploration centers are all in Republican-governed states. No Democratic congressman was going to support this law, so only the highest priorities of the Republican Party were considered,” Dreier explains. The specialist believes this situation opens the possibility that NASA’s science sector will fare somewhat better in the congressional debate on the budget, which must conclude before October 1. Since the BBB has set amounts for human exploration, perhaps this will leave some more money for other NASA projects and other federal agencies, which are facing brutal cuts.
The outlook for the coming months remains highly uncertain. NASA has been in a state of disarray since Donald Trump unexpectedly decided to remove Jared Isaacman, a billionaire he himself had appointed to head the agency. Isaacman is very close to Musk and had to juggle in the Senate to defend the country’s desire to reach the Moon before China, but also to prioritize missions to Mars, as Musk wanted. Ultimately, the rift between the president and the magnate left him without a position, and with no successor in sight. “I also found it inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon’s, who was involved in the Space Business, should run NASA, given that NASA is such a significant part of Elon’s corporate life,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social network.
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