Trump Tells Reporters He May Attend SpaceX Launch, Jokes: ‘I’d Like To Put You On The Rocket’

President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that he was considering attending the upcoming SpaceX rocket launch, which will feature the first NASA-manned mission to space on a privately built ship. In the brief remarks, the president also encouraged reporters to join him on the trip, joking that he’d like to put some of them on the rocket.

“I’m thinking about going, that will be next week, to the rocket launch. I hope you’re all going to join me,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn on Thursday afternoon. “I’d like to put you on the rocket, and get rid of you for a while.”

The launch, which is scheduled for Wednesday, May 27 at 4:33pm Eastern Standard Time, has also drawn buzz from Vice President Mike Pence, who commended the mission for ushering in “the trailblazers of a new era” of space exploration while meeting with the National Space Council on Tuesday.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has received widespread attention for his role at Tesla and his recent critiques of government lockdowns, has been hyping the launch on Twitter. On Thursday afternoon, Musk retweeted a video from SpaceX showing Falcon 9, the rocket, and Crew Dragon, the human capsule, going vertical on the launch pad in Florida.

The Washington Post recently described the historic nature of the mission, not only for its potential implications for the future of private space flight, but also because of the gamble Musk took to get the company to its current form over the last eighteen years.

The company was never supposed to succeed. Even its founder gave it odds few gamblers would take — 1 in 10.

But Elon Musk decided to go all in anyway, investing some $100 million of his own money, over the protest of his friends, family and the basic logic that said a private entrepreneur with no experience in spaceflight shouldn’t start a rocket company.

As The Daily Wire previously reported, during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Musk said that he abandoned his plans to build a dream house, in part, to fulfill part of the company’s mission to help people live on other planets.

“Does it really make sense for me to spend time designing and building a house?” remarked Musk. “Or should I be allocating that time to getting us to Mars? I should probably do the latter.”

“You can only do so many things,” said Musk. “Allocating time to building a house, even if it was a really great house, still is not a good use of time relative to developing the rockets necessary to get us to Mars and helping solve sustainable energy.”