Mission to Mars: The new space race

October 15, 2025·30 min·2 clips

In 2025, President Trump pledges to plant the American flag on Mars, while SpaceX founder Elon Musk grins approvingly.

A speech opens the horizon. Donald Trump's second inaugural address moves Mars from far off ambition into the middle of American exceptionalist politics. Elon Musk is watching, and the cameras catch the SpaceX founder grinning and giving two thumbs up as one of his oldest goals enters presidential language. The rhetoric is all frontier. Manifest destiny gets lifted from colonies and continents into orbit, with Mars treated as the next prize. NASA has to live inside that pressure. Jared Isaacman tells the host the agency can work on the moon and Mars even with limited money. His case is blunt: NASA has roughly $25 billion a year, or about $20 billion under the proposed budget, so who says that is not enough? He wants NASA to build technology that has no obvious revenue model, then pass proven work to industry. Competition, he argues, brings costs down. That puts SpaceX near the middle of any Mars plan, not off to the side. Until May, Isaacman looked likely to run NASA, but members of Congress were uneasy about his closeness to Musk. Then the politics snap. Musk leaves his temporary government post after tensions with Trump spill into a public social media fight. The mission still sounds grand. The ending lands somewhere smaller and harder: family left behind, and Earth disappearing from view.

As heard by us

Mars is framed as a policy fight, not a sci-fi promise.

Mission to Mars treats Mars less as a distant dream than as a political tool, opening with Trump's second inaugural address and the way it brings SpaceX and Elon Musk into the same frame.

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Why you'd press play

If you want Mars politics and the SpaceX orbit around it, this is the one to queue.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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