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President Trump issued a declaration yesterday (Nov. 3), proclaiming space open to all humanity for exploration, and the right of American citizens to develop and settle the solar system according to United States laws.
“The American Declaration of Freedom in Space,” describes space as the “province of all humans” and asserts that the United States will lead humanity’s expansion into the cosmos. The proclamation reiterates the administration’s goals with NASA’s Artemis program to return American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and eventually sending astronauts to Mars, but introduces no new funding, programs or policy directives.
“Our Nation will lead the way in the exploration, development, use, and settlement of these new frontiers — forging an interplanetary civilization founded on the enduring and inalienable rights of freedom and individual liberty,” the document says.
Trump invoked America’s “frontier spirit,” highlighting Apollo 11 astronauts as the first people in history to walk on the moon’s surface and robotic rovers exploring Mars as examples of U.S. leadership, and emphasized the country’s flourishing commercial space sector helping ensure “American space superiority for all eternity.”
“The nation that leads in space will shape the future of humanity,” the declaration says, and pledges that America will carry the values of faith, freedom and individual liberty into an interplanetary civilization.
The proclamation also highlights the success of NASA’s Artemis II mission in April, which carried four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon and set a record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. The follow-up to that mission, Artemis III, is scheduled to launch next summer (2027), and will test rendezvous and docking operations between NASA’s Orion spacecraft and the program’s two commercial lunar landers in low Earth orbit.
Artemis IV will be the program’s first lunar landing mission, and is targeted for 2028. A December 2025 executive order from the President reaffirmed the goal of meeting that timeline, as well as the deployment of the initial elements for a permanent lunar outpost by 2030.
Trump’s declaration yesterday does not establish new NASA programs, allocate additional funding or issue instructions to federal agencies. Its sweeping language, though, does echo some of the principles in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which guarantees freedom of exploration while prohibiting national sovereignty claims on other planets.
