Sucess with Private Space Companies, like SpaceX, to Continue with Trump In Other Areas Concerning NASA and Beyond.

Donald Trump wants to shut down the International Space Station and get ready for private space

The White House would cut off funding for the International Space Station in 2025 and lean into a future of commercially operated habitats in low-earth orbit, according to draft National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) budget documents shared with Quartz ahead of their official release Monday (Feb. 12).

 From article, (President Donald Trump’s 2019 budget request envisions NASA working closely with the private sector on every level, from outsourcing ground-to-space communications to landing on the moon, while focusing its own efforts on technology to take people into deep space. The budget would increase NASA’s spending by $375 million, to just under $20 billion annually.

The White House expects to stop spending on the International Space Station within seven years, and plans to create a new $150 million program to prepare private companies to take over operations on the ISS, or to replace it with their own space habitats. Bigelow Aerospace, which has a habitat hosted on the ISS and a dubious extraterrestrial research contract to boot, and Nanoracks, which works with NASA to launch satellites from ISS and with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to fly research payloads, have called for such programs for years.

Whether sufficient private demand for human time in space exists to finance these operations remains an open question. While the national lab onboard ISS remains underutilized, some companies (like Bezos, or the founders of Made in Space) think orbital manufacturing has a future, and others think space tourism or resource extraction could be lucrative.

The president’s budget also moves ahead to fund new partnerships with private companies to land robots on the moon, and accelerates a plan to launch the first segment of a moon-orbiting habitat on a private rocket by 2020. It would modestly increase spending on vehicles to explore deep space, particularly a rocket called SLS being built by Boeing and a spacecraft called Orion built by Lockheed Martin, which is expected to fly its first mission in 2020. It also funds new spacecraft, built by Boeing and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, that are expected to fly astronauts to ISS next year.)


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