Fresh off an appearance at a National Space Council meeting Monday, space was evidently on his mind when President Trump spoke at a campaign rally in Duluth, Minnesota, on Wednesday night. "Our beautiful ancestors won two world wars, defeated fascism and communism, and put a man on the face of the Moon," he told his adulatory crowd. "And I think you saw the other day, we're reopening NASA. We're going to be going to space."

The crowd responded by chanting, "Space Force! Space Force!"

The most obvious response to such a comment is to laugh. NASA has never closed, of course. NASA's budget, in terms of raw dollars, has never been larger. Additionally, the Space Force has nothing to do with NASA; it is a military enterprise. And the United States, thanks to SpaceX, is launching as many orbital rockets today as almost any time in history. We have never been more in space than we are now.

Painful words

And yet for NASA, these are truly painful words. With regard to human spaceflight, the space agency has struggled with public perception following the end of the space shuttle program in July 2011. Since then, NASA may have relied on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the International Space Station, but overall the agency has done a lot of valuable things. As I talked to a couple of astronauts Wednesday night, their general sentiment was dismay that the president truly was clueless about NASA's activities. This is especially disappointing because Vice President Mike Pence has taken his role as leader of the National Space Council so seriously. "Does he even talk to Pence??" one astronaut asked.

For those who do not know, NASA has had a mixed but overall positive record since the end of the space shuttle program. The agency has spent billions of dollars on a large rocket, the Space Launch System, and a spacecraft, Orion, since 2011. One may validly argue about the need for these vehicles given the rise of commercial rocket launchers and capsules such as Boeing's Starliner and SpaceX's Dragon that could be modified for deep space. But they do represent a commitment to finally move humans back out of low-Earth orbit and into deep space.

Perhaps less well known is NASA's ongoing support for the International Space Station, which has become the critical factor driving a lot of the commercial activity in space that Trump has praised. With contracts for private delivery of crew and cargo to the station, NASA provided the funds SpaceX needed to go from a struggling company with a one-engine rocket to the development of the Falcon Heavy booster with 27 engines.

Likewise it has spurred the development of other rockets and spacecraft, as well as providing a test bed for private space station concepts such as Bigelow's expandable habitat, 3D printing in microgravity, and hundreds of science experiments with potential commercial spin-offs. In short, if there are valid commercial markets to be found and developed in low-Earth orbit beyond satellites for observation and communication—and finding them is an express goal of the Trump administration—the space station is providing a platform for them to be discovered. Humans, by the way, have lived continuously in space, on the station, for nearly 18 years.

Good appointees

Beyond human spaceflight, NASA has flourished. In 2012 the most complex robotic lander to touch down on another world, Curiosity, safely reached the Red Planet. In 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, giving us our first glimpse of the last significant world in the Solar System to be explored. NASA will launch two more missions to the Red Planet within the next two years, and it has ambitious plans for two missions to Jupiter's enticing moon Europa in the 2020s. Meanwhile, the agency has continued to deepen our understanding of Earth's past, present, and future, and deep space telescopes have elucidated the nature of the Universe.

The sad part about Trump's remarks is that, beyond this rhetoric, his administration has taken spaceflight seriously. While parts of the government in Washington have been led by appointees who seem determined to undermine the mission of their agencies (hello, Scott Pruitt!), space has seen efficient leadership from the reinvigorated Space Council, with credible and respected appointees, such as its executive secretary, Scott Pace. Trump's choice for NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, was controversial. But since coming into office in April, Bridenstine has won over a number of critics, including some concerned about his climate science views. By all accounts he is doing a good or even great job.
No, NASA is not reopening. It has been hard at work for a long time, doing very hard things, and helping commercial companies get up to speed on spaceflight. The agency does need some help with its strategy for better using the emerging commercial rocket industry and its lower-cost boosters. But it is on a good trajectory of going back to deep space and using private companies to help it return to the Moon. All of these seeds were planted in earlier administrations, which chose not to politicize the cosmos.