A couple of days ago I learned that NASA are in the process of putting together a crewed mission back to the Moon - the intent this time is simply to orbit and then come back, rather than landing, but presumably that's a next step towards returning there.
I'm rather surprised by the lack of media attention on this one, and equally glad that America has brought their space programme back online in a big way. And, much as I don't like giving him credit, that it one of the definite good things of Trump's presidency - returning to the Moon, with a view to setting up an actual Moonbase, and longer term looking to Mars is the sort of big, bold strategy that we just haven't had for some decades.
It's also worth noting that all of this, especially Mars, is one of Elon Musk's particular obsessions as well. And it's easy to mock, but he is actually right - on a universal scale human life is incredibly vulnerable. It's only a matter of time before something happens to render the Earth uninhabitable (for us), so for the species to survive long-term we really do have to become first multi-planetary and then multi-stellar.
Of course, that "matter of time" may well be measured in centuries or millennia, so perhaps it's not the most urgent thing. But given the other things they're working on, it may be no bad thing to keep Trump and Musk focused on the skies...
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