Trump on NASA: "All of a sudden it's back. Did you notice?"
President Trump went to Ohio today to talk about infrastructure. At one point he talked about space.
“We must recapture the excitement of creation, the spirit of innovation, and the spark of invention. And we’re starting. You saw the rocket the other day, what’s going on with cars, what’s going on with so much. You see what’s going on … NASA space agency. All of a sudden it’s back. Did you notice? It was dormant for many, many years. Now, it’s back. And we’re trying to have the private sector to invest the money. Why the hell should we do it, right? Let them invest. If they want to send rocket ships up, they’re rich, let them do it. When I looked at the rocket that went up three weeks ago, where the tanks came back. Nobody’s ever seen that. It looks like, like Star Wars. But I looked at it and I heard the cost. I think they said 85 million dollars. If the government did, you’re talking about billions of dollars and maybe it wouldn’t work so well. But I thought it was a fantastic thing. But we’re working with the private sector and NASA, and we’re, we’re doing a great job. We’ve made so much progress in the last year. Don’t forget. It’s just been a little bit more than a year. But we’ve made so much progress. And other people are putting up a lot of money. And, they’re using our facilities. I feel like a landlord, again. We’re leasing them facilities. Not so bad. Not a bad idea. And they’re doing a great job.”
Keith’s note: NASA has hardly been “dormant”. Everything NASA is doing now was underway before Donald Trump took office. He has started nothing new. Yet. Indeed he has tried to cancel things. Plans by commercial space companies were also already in place and continue with no apparent impact by the Trump Administration. Yet. Just sayin’
I gotta admit these transcripts are hilarious to read because of his run on speaking style.
Ah the eloquence of Shakespeare. I do however like the fact that space has his attention.
I wish space DIDN’T have his attention. He’ll mess it up like he’s done with everything else (like his request to put a crew on EM-1).
It hurts my brain to read what he spoke.
Same here, it violates my basic understanding of the space-time continuum.
As space advocates we often forgot how little others know about what NASA. Even Presidents depend on advisors to brief them. But it looks like the roadster launching FH is starting to make an impression. And even bigger one will be made of BFR starts doing test hops next years. I think the future of the SLS/Orion/LOP-G is starting to look dim, and will be even more so once the cost difference between and FH sink in.
So true! So where are his advisors? Someone needs to tell him he requested $3B for just such a government program. Otherwise, he just looks like an idiot taking credit for the previous Administration’s support for commercial.
The problem is that the advisors are probably just telling him what NASA is telling them. That the SLS/Orion will do great things. That like the Saturn V/Apollo it will return humans to the Moon. That space exploration is vert expensive and the tens of billions of dollars needed for the SLS/Orion and LOP-G are the necesssry price that America must pay to remain the leader in space.
Falcon Heavy is showing the President that NASA may, just may, be wrong and there is a faster more economical option. That NASA today is may just be another expensive government bureaucracy. This message will be reinforced if Elon Musk starts the hop tests of the BFR next year. Seeing something that massive takeoff and landing without a long turn around will get noticed, especially compared to the $2 billion a flight throw away SLS/Orion.
” Seeing something that massive”
I don’t think the true size of BFR has really settled into anyone’s imagination. Not mine, at least. The thing is so stunningly massive that scale will be difficult.
I remember first seeing for instance the crawler NASA uses to cart Apollo/STS/SLS about. I mean sure you see pictures. But they don’t mean much until you see someone standing next to it. It will dwarf FH, not so much in height but in overall muscularity.
Follow the money (where is it being allocated) to see who is advising whom.
He has the best people, remember?
Every president says that about their staff, but ultimately they depend on the information the bureaucrats feed them since the bureaucrats are suppose to know what is going on. But like most in the Swamp they live in a bubble away from the rest of the world.
I don’t think he always uses speechwriters. When talking about space during the campaign you could tell when he and Hillary were speaking from a written speech and when they were winging it. He seemed to do either one or the other. Hillary would mix a prepared speech with her own opinions which were not well informed.
You don’t think Trump is doing the same? It’s his modus operandi to start with a prepared speech and to then diverge from said speech, with less than informed personal commentary.
I get the impression that Mr. Trump often says things without even starting from a prepared speech. That wouldn’t be so bad if the quality of the off-the-cuff content were better.
Not in the remarks that Keith quoted here. This looks totally brain-to-mouth to me.
Or to put it more plainly, word vomit.
“Brain Dump” might be a more useful term, since it can be adopted equally Trump fans and anti-fans alike…but whatever.
In politics and journalism it commonly leads to foot-in-mouth desease. 😉
Considering trump seems to go out of his way to point out how expensive NASA does things… he must be making friends in those republican NASA districts…
It is nice to have a commander in chief who recognizes commercial and private sector accomplishments. I wish Trump would have listened to more of the private sector folks as it pertains to NASA and space policy but the acknowledgement and positive commentary – despite his run on speaking style – is great to hear.
…you can thank Obama too for force feeding COTS back in the day because you sure as hell know Republicans would not have done it.
Keith, as you correctly said, this is a pattern of behavior for this administration – take credit for all good and potential good happening and blame others for all the bad. Narcissism, egocentrism, hubris are the calling cards of the day.
There is no point in reading what he said and then trying to glean policy from it – there is no connection. Actual policy comes from budgets and Congressional direction.
all I can say is “three more years” then hopefully this “experiment” will be over (it can’t get any worse … can it ?).
I’m thinking back 14 years ago VSE philosophy of reducing costs for access to space but that became a non-starter when Okeefe briefed congress about reducing costs (meaning less money doled out to those congressional districts). SpaceX shows it can be done cheaper, anyone willing to kill SLS to reduce monies going to congressional districts?
There was a time when US was dormant in spaceflight during 1970s, many thought nothing was happening unless you were one of those pulling allnighters to make the SSMEs and tiles work.
I remember those trips to capital hill and O’Keefe said that 14,000 NASA and contractor jobs would be lost … WOW you could hear a pin drop … it was an absolute non starter and O’Keefe was soon gone ..
The failure wasn’t really that the shuttle jobs were ending, it was that NASA had no plan to transition those workers to something meaningful to do for VSE. Had NASA had a plan to transition those jobs to others (fuel depots, landers, rovers, and etc.) the pork politics could have been maintained and we might have been exploring the moon again by now.
But the VSE stated no new rockets for NASA. That was NEVER going to fly for congress… ever
Agreed, but unfortunately the space shuttle was an economic disaster due to its low flight rate and standing army ($$$) to keep it going. SLS makes the space shuttle look affordable! With a predicted flight rate of at most two per year (limited by production and processing facilities), SLS will cost nearly as much as the space shuttle but will have a launch cadence that’s a mere fraction of that of the shuttle.
You’d think the astronaut office would also see the writing on the wall. With the flights being planned for the Deep Space Gateway (or whatever they’re calling it these days) all penciled in to have 4 crew per flight, that’s 8 flight opportunities per year. That dismal number makes SLS look even worse than its flight rate!
The high costs would be quite bearable if SLS were at least partly reusable and could be flown at a flight rate of 12 per year for the same cost. But NASA has gone down the road of making SLS completely expendable.
Eventually SLS will be cancelled, but it may take both SpaceX flying BFR and Blue Origin flying New Armstrong in order for the cries of “gold plated hammers” to finally win out over the pork politics of the situation.
Shuttle was alright until he first disaster, after that people started asking what we were paying for, then the second one happened and it was dead, Challenger and Columbia were the one two punch for the program, economic difficulties due to the 2008 recession didn’t help matters but they weren’t what killed it, it was already dead at that point
Obviously POTUS has never been told that SpaceX could not have existed without technical and fiscal assistance from NASA. It’s not just rich guys spending their own money.
While true, the costs to the US Government were about 1/10th of what it would have cost NASA to do the very same thing. Same with Cygnuss and Starliner. Competition is a good thing. Paying for milestones instead of cost-plus contracts with continually slipping deadlines (like on SLS/Orion) yields results faster, better, and cheaper. Now where have I heard that before?
Compared to his usual pattern of getting facts straight and self-agrandizing it’s actually a bit of an improvement. 😉
last time he said the FH was 80 million this time 85 million .. so by next time he should hit the actual price of 90.
There is an old saying, “close enough for government work.”
Sounds like people explained to him things he previously didn’t know or care about – and then instead of realizing it existed, took credit for its existence.
Classic Trump.
I’ve been doing some public speakiñg on space lately and space is back in the news. Maybe Trump is simply misconstruing that space and NASA are one and the same. They aren’t. Space-X is becoming very visible and they’re doing good things. Quite frankly, none of the others, most particularly NASA, are even in the news.