SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Since Trump’s inauguration, his cabinet and the heads of federal agencies have endured a fraught, heated battle of wills. In some instances, the president pledged to dismantle regulatory bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). For other overly bureaucratic and onerous offices, like the Department of Energy (DOE), Trump appointed leaders who were willing to sabotage the existing infrastructures and undo decades of unnecessary projects that attack faith-based initiatives. Now there remains the complex matter of what to do with NASA. The agency became one of Trump’s first targets, when he threatened to cut all funding for climate science. On Tuesday, however, the president surprised Congress by calling for a renewal of the space program, which he believes will prove instrumental in his massive deportation efforts.

NASA Should Focus on Reaching the Sun, Not Fretting Over Its Heat

Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump ordered a series of sweeping revisions, and omissions, to the White House website. Trump was sworn in as the nation’s 45th president at noon on January 20. Moments later, as People Magazine noted, “climate change, health care, and civil liberties pages disappeared” from federal government sites.

Visitors attempting to access the former links were redirected to error messages about missing content, a landing page for subscribing to personal updates from Trump, and, more startling, an e-commerce portal encouraging Americans to purchase Ivanka and Melania Trump fashion merchandise online. Advocates and agencies complained, including NASA. The space administration provides instrumental research into climate change but also atmospheric conditions, hurricanes, ocean activity and wildfires.

“Within weeks of the US election,” Quartz reported, “president Donald Trump said he intended to scrap NASA’s research on climate change, shifting those resources—less than $2 billion of the agency’s $19 billion budget—to its space program.”

Trump has not only voiced his enthusiasm for reigniting interstellar exploration, he has appealed to NASA for an expedited attempt to perform another manned moon mission. According to the Washington Post, “NASA has launched a feasibility study to see what the risks and benefits would be if the agency added two astronauts to the first test flight of a new rocket and capsule.”

It may also be no coincidence that Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night comes a day after SpaceX revealed its initiative to pilot two individuals on a lunar flyby in 2018. The Los Angeles Times said that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had already entertained discussions with interested civilian passengers who had “put down a ‘significant deposit,’ and will be paying their own way for the mission.”

Aliens Everywhere

On February 22, NASA confirmed the existence of the “first known system of seven Earth-sized planets around a single star.” The planets are firmly situated in a “habitable zone,” meaning that their proximity to a sun and the composition of their terrain are conducive to life. Terrified Trump officials described the discovery as an immigration nightmare, on an intergalactic scale.

Press Secretary Sean Spicer warned that extraterrestrial aliens could possess superior technology compared to admittedly dangerous domestic aliens. Mexican terrorists, as Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) explained on countless occasions, have developed the capability to smuggle nuclear warheads into the country by hiding them in bales of marijuana. The peril to the United States is undeniable: an unremarkable field worker sneaking a virtually unnoticeable 290-pound warhead over the border in an inconspicuous, four-foot high bundle of weed would be almost undetectable.

But Trump believes Mexicans may have begun experimenting with their own form of digital camouflage. He attributed to Mexican terrorists the spate of sexual assaults against women on college campuses by privileged white students.

“I find it difficult to believe that a nice young man like Brock Turner committed the heinous, brutal, disgusting, reprehensible attack on this co-ed,” Trump said. “Boys like Turner don’t do those things. That’s what Mexicans do when they come over the border illegally. That’s why they come over. I wouldn’t rule out Mexicans with some kind of cloaking device -- like a holographic poncho or serape or something.”

Terrestrial alien invaders need only cross a stagnant river and scale a tiny fence to breach the border. Aliens from beyond the solar system would likely possess more advanced technology, including apocalyptic weaponry. Trump also admitted that some of these creatures may already be among us.

“Look what happened in Idaho in 2015,” the president remarked. “You got a white kid accused of raping a black teen with a coat hanger. He, you know, he and some other kids in the locker room, they put this hanger in the black kid’s anus and kicked it. They just dug that that thing in there. And the judge said it wasn’t rape in the trial today, but these poor kids have to serve like 300 hours of community service. But I don’t think they did it. I think it was the aliens, the ones from outer space. They took over the bodies of those innocent, wholesome, light-skinned American heroes. That’s what they do, these space monkeys, anal probes and sick stuff like that.”

Trump also included transgender people on his immigration threat list on Monday, asserting that they were monsters who had swarmed to the United States from Transylvania. Sensing the risk, Trump presented a revised blueprint for launching a more drastic version of the stalled travel ban. “Expedited removal” will facilitate the swift deportation of undocumented aliens without an appearance before an immigration judge and due process protections.

“To really protect the American people, the ones who founded this amazing land, sending horrible immigrants back to their filthy deserts or nasty planets won’t stop the problem for good,” explained Trump. “They’ll find news ways to come back. And we’ll run out of money building higher walls or toxic moats or more powerful orbiting battle stations. NASA and SpaceX have the answer. We round up all the bad hombres, from wherever they came from, and we send them to the moon. Or Mars or Venus or Pluto, whatever. The can infest those places, worship the demons of their choice, rape themselves, blow up schools and leave decent people alone.”

Criticisms and Concerns

Trump hailed lunar deportation colonies as the “final frontier” of immigration reform. “These dark, America-hating jihadists can boldly go to their 72 virgins without taking us along for the ride,” Trump stated. “And I think they’ll be happier there. Steve Bannon told me that’s why black people are called moon crickets.”

Some scientists have expressed concerns about the reliability of SpaceX transportation systems. On September 1, the company’s two-stage Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the launch pad, destroying the engines and the payload -- an Amos-6 communications satellite. Mike Fallopian, chief engineer and vice president of Yoyodyne’s Galatronics Division, endorsed Trump’s proposal with reservation.

“I support SpaceX and President Trump moving forward with these plans,” Fallopian said, “so long as the rockets don’t detonate on the pad and kill the hundreds of passengers who are expecting to see their new planet before their creator.”

The journey will require more rockets than a standard trip to a satellite, which means the craft will be outfitted with numerous SpaceX propulsion engines. That worries Fallopian: “More SpaceX equipment attached to the ship creates an exponentially higher chance of fatal explosions. I honestly think the crew would have better odds risking an engine failure than an extinction level event. By rough calculations, every SpaceX rocket equals one push of the doorbell to God’s house.”

Trump agreed about the risks to crew members. To prevent placing American astronauts in jeopardy, he agreed to increase funding for an automated flight and navigational system, “like that funny little robot from Star Tours. Why can’t we just use him? I mean, Disney and Musk are two of the last people on my business advisory board. They can work it out.”

(c) 2017. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. All articles are works of satire. See disclaimers.