The Trump administration’s mission to root out diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from the federal government now includes the moon—and who NASA has promised to land on it.
Back in 2019, during the first Trump administration, NASA announced that its Artemis program that is slated to take astronauts back to the lunar surface in 2027, would also feature the first woman and the first person of color landing on the moon.
This was part of a broader effort by federal space agency officials who in recent years have been working to revamp NASA’s image as an agency dominated by white men, a reputation that is hard to shake off when one considers that every astronaut who has set foot on the moon has matched that description.
In fact, NASA didn’t send a woman to space at all until Sally Ride’s historic flight on the Challenger space shuttle in 1983, with Guion Buiford becoming the first Black astronaut aboard the Challenger later that same year.
Thus, the fact that NASA officials were making a point of ensuring that a woman and a person of color would be moonwalking when Artemis III, the mission slated for 2027 that is planning to include a lunar landing, has been a big deal.
As such, it has been deliberately featured on NASA’s Artemis project website.
Right up until late last week, the homepage for the Artemis project still noted that this was a key part of its mission: “Nasa will land the first woman, first person of color, and first international partner astronaut on the Moon using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.”
However, this language was wiped from the website last Friday, a move that was made as part of the federal space agency’s efforts to follow the Trump administration’s executive order to remove all diversity, equity and inclusion efforts from federal administrations.
“In keeping with the president’s executive order, we’re updating our language regarding plans to send crew to the lunar surface as part of Nasa’s Artemis campaign,” NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel told the Orlando Sentinel, confirming that the removal had been deliberate and that the pledge itself is also now defunct.
Although NASA officials have yet to go into the broader implications of all references to this pledge being scrubbed from the website, the space agency is part of the scramble that is taking place across the federal government. Complying with President Donald Trump’s executive order, signed on the day of his inauguration two months ago, has translated to the Defense Department, the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department and pretty much every other federal agency wiping out anything that might be attached to DEI, some of which, like Jackie Robinson’s Defense Department page, have then quickly been restored in the face of public outrage.
It’s unclear how much all of this will actually affect Artemis itself. NASA officials have already announced the astronauts who will comprise the crew for Artemis II, the mission scheduled for April 2026 that will see the Orion spacecraft orbit the moon, which includes both a woman, astronaut Christina Koch, and an African American, astronaut Victor Glover. However, the crew for Artemis III, the 2027 mission that will actually take astronauts back to the moon for the first time since 1972, has yet to be announced.
Meanwhile, there’s some concern about whether the Artemis program itself is in the clear, albeit for other reasons. Artemis, which has cost NASA about $40 billion so far, has had its troubles, including issues with the Orion crew capsule’s heat shield and delays in the development of the SLS (Space Launch System), which, according to NASA is ” the only rocket that can send Orion, astronauts, and cargo directly to the Moon in a single launch.”
All of this could make it a soft target for Elon Musk, the head of the Department for Government Efficiency, and his acolytes as they continue making indiscriminate cuts to the federal government.
In his joint address to Congress last month, Trump mentioned going to Mars but made nary a mention of another trip to the moon. On top that, SpaceX founder and CEO Musk has long made it known that he is not an Artemis fan. He has recently questioned going to the moon at all via social media, calling it a “distraction” and proclaiming we need to go straight to Mars.
More tellingly still, last month Boeing, the main contractor for the SLS rocket that is key to Artemis, warned employees that they could be cutting about 400 jobs due to “revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
