When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, many in the space industry assumed there would be immediate changes at NASA, particularly in its human spaceflight programs. Elon Musk had the ear of the new president and had publicly talked up sending humans to Mars as soon as possible and did so while criticizing how NASA structured its Artemis lunar exploration campaign.

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Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews. He earned a Ph.D. in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree with honors in geophysics and planetary science...