He didn't call it a Moonshot or a Manhattan Project of Space, that is the kind of language his political opponents use(1), President Trump announcing a U.S. Space Academy invoked something even bolder - Star Trek.
Unlike the Star Wars universe, you won't have to be born elite, it will be open to anyone who can qualify. In Star Trek, Starfleet Academy was like the U.S. Naval Academy, you just had to have good grades to get in. Nothing else mattered. They wanted to send fleets out to create space westerns, and that meant boldly going where no one has gone before. And the U.S. Space Academy has a similar vibe.
But vibe is all there is right now. It's an executive order and if recent Democratic party behavior about science is any indication, it could be wiped out in 2029 if they win back the White House.(2) The problem now will be excecution. It will still be under NASA, and NASA pivoted from being a bold space effort to being just another government job works program decades ago. The James Webb Space Telescope launched 20 years behind schedule and was 1000% over budget. It will take us longer to go back to the moon than it took for the Wright Brothers to have first flight before we went to the moon the first time. That's all because of NASA.
Credit: NASA/John Kraus
Maybe NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is more like the actual James Webb than 50 years of administrators like Bob Frosch and Jim Beggs but he has an uphill battle; the cultural forces entrenched for decades that have caused NASA to become more like the CDC than a science body and are going to try to wait him out. They have their social justice checkboxes for every hire and every program and getting back to mission-first behavior won't be easy. If they don't, the Space Academy will be choosing participants based on everything except merit and that means its chances for success will be lower.(3)
Progressives are already out in opposition. Former Democratic NASA officials say the word "academy" is problematic, because it sounds like the military, and NASA is not a military organization. It is nothing more than a statement and former bureaucrats who ran NASA into the ground to such an extent that people think SpaceX is the actual NASA want to make sure NASA stays the way it was - irrelevant to space exploration.
NOTES:
(1) Ironic verbiage in that Democrats have canceled far more space programs than Republicans and hate nuclear science.
(2) Imagine if Nixon had canceled the space program because Kennedy - the guy whose allies blatantly cheated him out of winning the 1960 election - had started it. That is what Obama did to George W. Bush and the Constellation program. Which is why Artemis II only recently got around to orbiting the moon.
(3) Jim Kirk was based on lots of actual Naval officers from World War II, Star Trek Discovery was based on some bizarre demographic analysis by Alex Kurtzman that said everyone wanted the Federation to be morally relative bad actors so actors could over-emote their preachiness, while everyone talked about what the Federation should be.
