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President Donald Trump may be one step closer to making Pluto great again.
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Trump backed NASA Administrator Jared Isakman’s idea to make Pluto a planet again.
“I support President Trump 100% to make Pluto great again,” Isakman said.
The heated debate over the definition of Pluto has been raging since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) stripped Pluto of its “dwarf planet” status in 2006.
The IAU argued that Pluto was no longer “obvious” about its orbit around the Sun and no longer met all three criteria.
Pluto was first discovered in 1930 by American astronomer Clyde Tomba, who grew up in Kansas and attended the University of Kansas before discovering it at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
“I think we owe it to all Kansans and their great contributions to astronomy and space to properly restore the planet,” Isaacman said.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told the Daily Mail his support for reclassifying Pluto as a planet.
Pluto was downgraded from the ninth planet to a dwarf planet in 2006, but NASA experts and others refused to accept the change. Former NASA chief Jim Bridenstine, Elon Musk, and William Shatner supported Pluto’s return to planet status.
Isaacman spoke to the Daily Mail about the future of space in an exclusive interview ahead of the Artemis II manned mission to return to the moon.
The president recently supported the idea of reclassifying Pluto as a planet, which was supported by Star Trek actor William Shatner, Captain James T. Best known for his role as Kirk.
In May, Shatner described the IAU as “a group of corrupt geniuses on a power trip” and called on Trump to “restore Pluto as a planet and end the tyranny of the space union.”
Trump’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico the US Gulf seems to give hope to defenders of the planet Pluto.
Shatner called on SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to encourage the president to “sign one of those executive documents to make Pluto a planet again,” an idea Musk supported.
“I support it,” Musk replied to Shatner.
The president stayed out of the debate, but that didn’t stop his supporters from getting involved.
In February, Utah Senator Mike Lee supported the idea.
“President Trump, do one thing for us: make Pluto a planet again,” he wrote on social media in February.
William Shatner Calls on President Donald Trump to Issue an Executive Order to Restore Pluto’s Status in Our Solar System
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine made a strong case for Pluto becoming a planet again during Trump’s first term.
During President Trump’s first term, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine argued that Pluto should be classified as a planet because it has a subsurface ocean, organic compounds and its own moons.
“Some argue that in order to have a planet, you need to clear its orbit around the Sun,” he said in 2019. “Now we know that if that’s the definition we’re going to use, you can actually shrink all the planets.”
“They are all dwarf planets because no planet moves through its entire orbit around the Sun,” he concluded.
