President Donald Trump just gave the longest State of the Union address in recorded history, a speech filled with examples of the United States’ leadership status in the world, but it omitted one possible point of pride: NASA’s upcoming Artemis 2 moonshot, America’s first lunar flight with astronauts in over 50 years, which didn’t even get a mention.
Trump’s speech on Tuesday night (Feb. 24) lasted more than 107 minutes, setting a new record for presidential addresses before Congress. But there wasn’t a lot for space fans to sink their teeth into, even though NASA’s Artemis 2 astronaut crew was there in person.
“This is a different fighting force than we had years ago, when we fought to tie,” Trump said about 90 minutes into Tuesday’s State of the Union (SOTU) speech. “It’s a great fighting force. I’m so proud of it. Look at Space Force. The Space Force is my baby, because we did that. My baby’s becoming so important.”
He then discussed the U.S. military’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro last month. The Space Force apparently played a key role in that mission, which was known as Operation Absolute Resolve.
There was just one other mention of the final frontier in Tuesday night’s SOTU, the second of Trump’s second term in office. It occurred near the end, as Trump waxed poetic about what America has achieved over the first 250 years of its history.
“Together, we mastered the world’s mightiest industries, shattered history’s monstrous tyrannies, and we liberated millions from the chains of fascism, communism, oppression and terror,” Trump said. “Americans lifted humanity into the skies on the wings of aluminum and steel, and then we launched mankind into the stars on rockets powered by sheer American will and unyielding American pride.”
The president ended his address without mentioning NASA’s Artemis 2 mission, which will launch four astronauts around the moon as soon as April 1. It will be the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 back in 1972.
That omission is somewhat surprising, because the Artemis 2 astronauts — NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — attended the SOTU as guests of Mike Johnson (R-La.), Speaker of the House of Representatives.
And the Artemis program, which aims to establish one or more bases near the moon’s south pole in the next five years or so, is another one of Trump’s babies: It was established in December 2017, during his first term. Back then, the president said he wanted Artemis astronauts to land on the moon by late 2024, which he envisioned would be the tail end of his second term in office.
That didn’t happen, of course. The program has experienced multiple delays over the years, including one that was announced just this past weekend. NASA had been gearing up to launch Artemis 2 as soon as March 6, but a glitch with the mission’s Space Launch System rocket is forcing team members to roll the vehicle off the launch pad for troubleshooting.
That rollback, which will occur on Wednesday (Feb. 25), pushes the Artemis 2 liftoff back to April 1 at the earliest.
The Artemis 2 quartet — who went into quarantine on Friday (Feb. 21) to prep for their flight, only to leave it a day later — didn’t get much screen time during Tuesday night’s speech. The only spaceflyer we saw on TV in NBC’s broadcast was U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who flew four space shuttle missions during his days as a NASA astronaut.
The Trump administration, by the way, recently censured Kelly — a former Navy fighter pilot with 39 combat missions under his belt — over his participation in a video that urged U.S. servicemembers not to obey illegal orders. Kelly has sued the Pentagon and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth over that censure campaign.
Last year’s State Of The Union speech had a slightly spacier feel to it. During that speech, Trump said that Americans “will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
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