It's Time For Trump To Annex The Moon
There’s only one answer. We get there first, claim it explicitly, and make the costs of challenging us too high for anyone to contemplate.
President Trump signed an executive order Dec. 18 promising American boots on lunar soil by 2028 and a nuclear-powered outpost two years after that. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire astronaut and freshly minted NASA administrator, was sworn in the same day.
I’ll admit the child in me — the one who begged his parents for a Walmart telescope every Christmas — eats this shit up. But I have good reason to doubt. The Artemis program, an unmitigated disaster, has been promising a return to the Moon since Trump’s first term, when the target was 2024. That slipped to 2026, then 2027, and now — with SpaceX’s Starship lander still exploding on test flights and Axiom scrambling to redesign spacesuits that lack basic life-support systems — we’re looking at 2028, maybe, if everything goes right.
Doubts aside, I’m broadly optimistic: the legal scaffolding for American lunar dominance has been assembling itself for a decade; the Congress granted property rights to extracted space resources in 2015; Trump declared in 2020 that the United States “does not view outer space as a global commons” (based); the Artemis Accords now have 55 signatories agreeing to American-defined “safety zones” around lunar operations.
None of it goes far enough. If we’re serious about beating China to the Moon — and we better be — diplomatic half-measures and politely negotiated “safety zones” won’t cut it. When American men touch down in 2028, we can’t just plant a flag. We did that already. The president needs to declare the Moon a U.S. territory. A formal assertion of American jurisdiction over the whole rock — its craters, its ice, its helium-3, all 14.6 million square miles of it.
In ancient days, our ancestors saw their heroes in the constellations. We saw the same, except ours were epic men of flesh and blood, as Nixon put it in that speech he thankfully never had to deliver. It’s a beautifully haunting speech, unfortunately stained with anemic language about “mankind” touching “some corner of another world.” I have no use for corners, and less for mankind. Those were American men, and when they return, the world they touch will be American too.