President Donald Trump turned a touching tribute to a NASA astronaut’s late wife into a chance to talk about himself during a speech at Houston’s Johnson Space Center.
“During the mission, the crew named a previously unnamed lunar crater in loving memory of [NASA Commander Reid Wiseman’s] wonderful wife, who he lost to cancer,” the president said Friday during his speech honoring the Artemis II mission crew.
“I wish they’d name something like that after me, Reid, but I don’t know,” he joked. “I’ll have to get the governor’s approval.”
During their April mission, Wiseman and his fellow crew members elected to name the moon crater Carroll in honor of the 46-year-old pediatric nurse practitioner, who died of cancer in 2020.
“We lost a loved one, her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie,” Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen said at the time. “And if you want to find this one, you look at Glushko, and it’s just to the northwest of that at the same latitude as Ohm. And it’s a bright spot on the moon. And we would like to call it ‘Carroll.’”
As part of his visit to Texas to rally for Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton, Trump visited the space center to award the Artemis II crew with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest space honor.
But, in typical Trump fashion, the speech intended to honor the astronauts’ extraordinary feat was mostly about himself.
While thanking the NASA engineers and scientists who made the Artemis II mission possible, Trump suddenly brought up his uncle as proof of his love for space.
“I had an uncle who was a great scientist, a great man. He was at MIT for 41 years, Dr. John Trump. And he loved space. He used to tell me about space,” he said. “He would throw in the word nuclear every once in a while … Genetically, I believe in that stuff. I love it. I find it so interesting, so amazing.”
Then he used his time at the podium to bash previous administrations.
“It was very embarrassing, actually, what had happened,” he said. “Not only had the United States lost its ability to send our astronauts to the moon but under the Bid— under a number of administrations, I have to tell you, but in particular the Obama administration, we even lost our ability to send astronauts into orbit. We had no ability in space whatsoever, we totally lost it,” he said.
A majority of audience members — among them some of the nation’s most skilled astronauts, scientists and engineers — showed no enthusiasm for Trump’s antics. The crowd stayed relatively emotionless throughout the speech, including when Trump bragged about the stock market.
“This country is doing great right now,” he claimed, despite rising inflation rates and living costs amid his ongoing war with Iran. “Eighty-one stock market highs in 1 1/2 years, never been anything like it.”