President Donald Trump may be one step closer to making Pluto great again.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacson endorsed the idea of Trump making Pluto a planet again in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail at the John F Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
‘I 100% support President Trump making Pluto great again,’ Isaacson said.
The hotly debated definition of Pluto has raged ever since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) stripped Pluto of its status as a planet in 2006, defining it as a ‘dwarf planet.’
The IAU argued Pluto was not ‘clear’ of its orbit around the sun and no longer meets the three criteria required to be classified as a planet.
The planet was first discovered in 1930 by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh who was raised in Kansas and attended the University of Kansas before discovering it at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
‘I think we owe it to everyone from Kansas and all their great contributions to astronomy and aerospace to rightfully restore that discovery to a planet,’ Isaacson said.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman spoke to the Daily Mail about his support for classifying Pluto as a planet again
Pluto was downgraded from the ninth planet to a dwarf planet in 2006, but a NASA expert and others have refused to accept the change. Former NASA chief Jim Bridenstine, Elon Musk, and William Shatner have all supported the cause of giving Pluto its planetary status back
Isaacson spoke to the Daily Mail about the future of space during an exclusive interview ahead of the planned Artemis II manned mission back to the moon.
The idea of the president recently reclassifying Pluto as a planet was endorsed by Star Trek actor William Shatner, famous for playing the role of Captain James T. Kirk.
Shatner excoriated the IAU as ‘a bunch of corrupt nerds on a power trip’ in May and urged Trump to ‘restore Pluto as a planet and put an end to the union’s tyranny of the cosmos.’
Trump’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America appears to have offered Pluto’s planetary defenders a slice of hope.
Shatner urged SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to encourage the president to ‘sign one of those Executive thingies to make Pluto a planet again,’ an idea that Musk endorsed.
‘I’d support that,’ Musk replied to Shatner.
The president had not weighed in on the debate, but it has not stopped people who support him from weighing in.
The idea was endorsed by Senator Mike Lee of Utah in February.
‘President Trump, please do one thing for us: Make Pluto Planetary Again,’ he wrote on social media in February.
William Shatner called on President Donald Trump to issue an executive order to restore Pluto’s status as a planet in our solar system
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine made a strong case for making Pluto a planet again in Trump’s first term
In President Trump’s first term, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine argued that since Pluto had an ocean under the surface, organic compounds, and its own moons, it should be classified as a planet.
‘Some people have argued that in order to be a planet, you need to clear your orbit around the sun,’ he said in 2019. ‘[W]hat we now know is that if that’s the definition that we’re gonna use, you could really undercut all the planets’.
‘They’re all dwarf planets because there isn’t a planet that clears its entire orbit around the sun,’ he concluded.
