Mars is back on the agenda.
During his address to a joint session of Congress in March, President Donald Trump stated that the United States “will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” This reflects the administration’s belief that it is the manifest destiny of Americans to expand beyond Earth, similar to the westward expansion across North America in the 1800s, and it aims to take steps toward achieving this goal.