While we all know that Mike Pence is a complete jerkwad for touching expensive things he clearly has no business touching (…and for a few hundred thousand other things…) what has been largely missed in the otherwise excellent coverage is the message he actually came to NASA to give.

Pence gave a speech – before proving his ignorance and/or rejection of the concept of consent – promising all of us that Trump was going to make NASA great again.

Now, he didn’t say that he was going to give more money to NASA. He didn’t lay out a specific new mission or any particular methodology for achieving any particular space-related goal. What he did do was take the long-discussed concept of a martian mission and give it a spin that was both quintessentially Trumpian and quite literally Orwellian as he conjured up the administration’s vision of the future:

from this bridge to space, our nation will return to the moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars

Forever, I’m sure.