Another Trump Trip To The Cape, At Least $1.1 Million More In Costs For Taxpayers
No president has ever attended a “first” launch of a crewed spacecraft.
No president has ever attended the inaugural flight of any crewed vehicle ― not John F. Kennedy for Mercury-Redstone 3, not Lyndon Johnson for Gemini 3 or Apollo 7, not Ronald Reagan for the first space shuttle flight in 1981, although Reagan was convalescing after having been shot two weeks earlier.
Reagan did not attend the shuttle’s “return to flight” launch in 1988 following the 1986 Challenger disaster, and George W. Bush did not attend a second return to flight in 2005 following the 2003 breakup of Columbia during reentry.
Neither the White House nor the Trump campaign would return HuffPost queries about whether footage from a successful launch would make its way into a campaign ad.
His campaign, however, has not been shy about turning around video from purportedly “official” events ― those paid for entirely by taxpayers and, in theory, done on behalf of all Americans ― into reelection videos.
Trump’s multimillion-dollar July 4th extravaganza on the National Mall last year later appeared in his videos.
And Trump’s March 28 visit to Norfolk, Virginia, for the sailing of the hospital ship Comfort made it into a Trump campaign ad released May 4.
Each hour that the modified 747 jetliner that Trump normally uses as Air Force One is in the air costs $273,063, according to a General Accountability Office analysis, meaning a round trip to Kennedy Space Center runs $1.1 million.
That figure does not include the $58,000 that his helicopter trip from the White House to Joint Base Andrews and back costs, nor the several hundreds of thousands of dollars that ferrying his motorcade aboard C-17 cargo planes
That amount varies with the starting location of the planes and the cars and vans, which differs with each trip.
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