Updated August 22, 2026 · 15 min read · by Jake Hari
The Quick Answer
Kalshi is running 32 contracts on NASA's Johnson Space Center ceremony this Friday, August 28: 31 of them on specific words Donald Trump might use, plus one on whether the event qualifies for payout at all. The prices lean the way a campaign rally leans, with stump-speech phrases like Democrat and Hottest quoted in the 40s and 50s, but the event on the schedule is a medal ceremony for four astronauts. Our eight-model AI panel, which read Kalshi's own record of 1,397 settled contracts from 46 past Trump events before pricing anything, landed below the market on 24 of the 31 words, and its single biggest disagreement sits on the one contract where the money looks most certain of itself.
All 32 contracts, every model's number, the eight words nobody has traded even once, and the one previous Medal of Honor ceremony Kalshi ever priced, which settled at 4 words out of 28, are below.
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The Event: Four Astronauts And A Medal That Almost Never Gets Given
At 11:00 a.m. EDT on Friday, August 28, the President will present the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four members of the Artemis II crew at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The recipients are NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, plus Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is a named participant. All of that comes from NASA's own announcement, published August 21.
The crew earned it in April. Artemis II completed a 10-day flight around the Moon on April 10, 2026, the first crewed mission aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft and the first time humans traveled beyond the Moon in more than half a century. They also went farther from Earth than anyone ever has.
The medal itself is the part most people will not know. Congress authorized it in 1969, and 30 astronauts have received it in the 57 years since. Seventeen of those 30 awards were posthumous, to the Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia crews. Before Friday, the most recent presentation was January 31, 2023, when Vice President Kamala Harris presented it on President Joe Biden's behalf to Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken for flying the first crewed SpaceX mission. That ended a 16-year gap going back to April 2006, the longest the award has ever gone unclaimed. This is a rare, scripted, ceremonial event with four people standing on a stage waiting to be handed something.
Eight days before it, on August 20, the President signed a national security presidential memorandum on space transportation. The White House fact sheet is titled "President Donald J. Trump Launches the Golden Age of Space Transportation." It sets a target of more than 1,000 launches and reentries a year by 2030 and directs NASA to facilitate commercial robotic access to Mars and to explore commercial ways of sending humans there and back. White House science adviser Michael Kratsios said a "commercial-first approach" is what makes a moon landing by 2028 possible. That memorandum is fresh in the President's mouth, and it is why several words on this board are live at all.
How A Kalshi Mention Market Actually Works
This is the part people get wrong the first time, so it is worth being exact. Each word on the board is its own independent yes-or-no contract. "Moon" is not competing with "Mars" for one slot. Both can hit, neither can hit, or all 32 can hit. That is why the prices do not add up to 100 the way a moneyline does. There is no single winner here, just 32 separate questions about one speech. Our primer on how prediction markets work covers the basic idea if this is new.
A price in cents is the market's read on probability, before you account for the spread and the fees. A contract quoted at 71 cents means the crowd puts roughly a 71% chance on Trump saying that word. If he says it, the contract pays out a dollar. If he does not, it pays nothing.
The settlement language is stricter than it looks, and it is where the longshots live or die. Kalshi's rules for this event require the exact word, or a plural or possessive form of it, spoken by Trump himself in an official capacity during the remarks. Tense changes do not count. A hot-mic aside does not count. Archive footage does not count. For a slash contract like "Crypto / Bitcoin," either word satisfies it. Kalshi settles off video of the live broadcast, falling back to official transcripts if its own staff cannot agree.
There is also a contract called "Event does not qualify," and it is not decoration. It resolves YES if the ceremony is cancelled, is not carried, or otherwise fails the payout criterion, and when it does, every other word on the board resolves NO regardless of what anyone said.
The Board Nobody Is Trading
Before the prices, the honest thing to say about them: there is almost no money here.
Kalshi listed this board at 4:33 p.m. UTC on August 21. As of 3:56 a.m. UTC on August 22, all 32 contracts together had traded 8,290 contracts in their entire lifetime, with about 8,274 of those still open. To put that next to its own neighbors on the same exchange, one single contract on Kalshi's Moon-landing ladder, the one asking whether NASA lands a person before 2028, has traded 198,820 contracts by itself. One rung of the SpaceX launch-count board has traded 157,544. This entire 32-contract board has traded about 4% of one of them.
Eight of the 32 contracts have never traded a single time: Stock Market, First Term, Iran, Afford / Affordable / Affordability, Houston, Biden, Oil / Gas / Gasoline, and Russia / Russian. Their quotes are a market maker's opening guess with nobody on the other side yet. A tight spread on one of those, like Stock Market at 35 against 40, is the maker's confidence rather than the crowd's.
Fourteen of the 32 carry a bid-ask spread of 20 cents or wider, which is another way of saying nobody has met in the middle. Houston shows 55 bid against 88 ask. Russia shows 9 bid against 43 ask. Buying and immediately selling one of those would cost you a third of the position before Trump opens his mouth. Where you see a wide gap between the two numbers below, treat the midpoint as a rough label rather than a real price.
In the 46 minutes between when our panel priced the board and when we refreshed the quotes for this article, five contracts changed hands across all 32 markets. That is the whole trading picture.
The Board: 31 Words And One Escape Hatch, Priced
Every contract, sorted by where our panel landed. Market quotes are the live bid and ask as of August 22, 2026, read at 4:20 a.m. UTC. The panel column is the blended number, meaning the median of the eight independent model estimates, generated at 3:34 a.m. UTC the same night. The gap is simply the panel minus the market midpoint.
| Word Or Phrase | Market (bid / ask) | Panel | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Houston | 55¢ / 88¢ | 92% | +20.5 |
| Moon | 82¢ / 93¢ | 89% | +1.5 |
| Jared / Isaacman | 78¢ / 90¢ | 86.5% | +2.5 |
| Apollo | 63¢ / 77¢ | 81% | +11 |
| Mars | 80¢ / 87¢ | 76.5% | -7 |
| Golden Age | 70¢ / 83¢ | 65.5% | -11 |
| Biden | 64¢ / 85¢ | 63% | -11.5 |
| ISS / International Space Station | 38¢ / 41¢ | 44.5% | +5 |
| China / Chinese | 48¢ / 74¢ | 43.5% | -17.5 |
| Nuclear | 28¢ / 61¢ | 41% | -3.5 |
| First Term | 52¢ / 67¢ | 41% | -18.5 |
| SpaceX | 35¢ / 59¢ | 41% | -6 |
| Oil / Gas / Gasoline | 9¢ / 32¢ | 34.5% | +14 |
| Manufacture / Manufacturing | 26¢ / 49¢ | 34% | -3.5 |
| Russia / Russian | 9¢ / 43¢ | 34% | +8 |
| Election | 35¢ / 49¢ | 31% | -11 |
| Democrat | 48¢ / 73¢ | 29% | -31.5 |
| Elon / Musk | 24¢ / 38¢ | 24% | -7 |
| MAGA / Make America Great Again | 12¢ / 38¢ | 24% | -1 |
| Space Force | 75¢ / 80¢ | 21.5% | -56 |
| Fake News | 35¢ / 39¢ | 21% | -16 |
| Stock Market | 35¢ / 40¢ | 19% | -18.5 |
| Hottest | 43¢ / 69¢ | 16.5% | -39.5 |
| Moon Base | 45¢ / 54¢ | 15.5% | -34 |
| Alien | 21¢ / 37¢ | 13% | -16 |
| Iran | 33¢ / 49¢ | 12% | -29 |
| Data Center | 6¢ / 19¢ | 12% | -0.5 |
| Afford / Affordable / Affordability | 7¢ / 38¢ | 12% | -10.5 |
| Starlink | 7¢ / 30¢ | 10.5% | -8 |
| UFO / UAP | 8¢ / 34¢ | 5.5% | -15.5 |
| Event Does Not Qualify | 2¢ / 3¢ | 5% | +2.5 |
| Crypto / Bitcoin | 3¢ / 13¢ | 4% | -4 |
These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange for event contracts, 18+, and availability varies by state.
Read the top and the bottom of that table together and the shape is obvious. The five words the panel likes best are all things you would only say at this specific ceremony. The words it likes least are the ones you would say at a rally in an arena.
More live boards from the same panel: Artemis 3 moon landing odds, where a crewed landing before 2029 is quoted 17¢ bid against 23¢ ask · SpaceX launch count 2026, with Above 160 launches at 34¢ · the last Trump mention board we priced, from his Nassau County remarks. Prices fetched August 22, 2026.
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Every Seat's Number
The full per-model board. Each seat priced every contract independently, without ever being shown the market price, then read the other seven anonymized estimates and was allowed to revise. These are the numbers after that revision round.
| Word Or Phrase | Fable | Opus | Sonnet | ChatGPT | Gemini | Kimi | GLM | DeepSeek | Panel |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Houston | 92% | 93% | 92% | 89% | 96% | 90% | 92% | 85% | 92% |
| Moon | 92% | 93% | 55% | 84% | 95% | 87% | 88% | 90% | 89% |
| Jared / Isaacman | 85% | 88% | 82% | 84% | 89% | 82% | 90% | 88% | 86.5% |
| Apollo | 68% | 78% | 87% | 76% | 82% | 85% | 80% | 95% | 81% |
| Mars | 78% | 82% | 72% | 78% | 87% | 66% | 68% | 75% | 76.5% |
| Golden Age | 62% | 72% | 66% | 64% | 82% | 62% | 65% | 80% | 65.5% |
| Biden | 55% | 80% | 66% | 64% | 60% | 52% | 62% | 65% | 63% |
| ISS / International Space Station | 42% | 44% | 44% | 43% | 64% | 53% | 46% | 45% | 44.5% |
| China / Chinese | 42% | 62% | 47% | 41% | 45% | 35% | 52% | 35% | 43.5% |
| Nuclear | 27% | 52% | 47% | 48% | 28% | 50% | 35% | 20% | 41% |
| First Term | 42% | 30% | 43% | 45% | 42% | 36% | 38% | 40% | 41% |
| SpaceX | 42% | 42% | 40% | 45% | 35% | 50% | 38% | 25% | 41% |
| Oil / Gas / Gasoline | 36% | 16% | 28% | 34% | 35% | 38% | 35% | 20% | 34.5% |
| Manufacture / Manufacturing | 42% | 30% | 40% | 46% | 28% | 14% | 38% | 12% | 34% |
| Russia / Russian | 30% | 55% | 35% | 37% | 33% | 32% | 32% | 38% | 34% |
| Election | 31% | 42% | 28% | 31% | 32% | 30% | 32% | 25% | 31% |
| Democrat | 37% | 17% | 27% | 32% | 28% | 30% | 35% | 15% | 29% |
| Elon / Musk | 24% | 34% | 13% | 24% | 15% | 20% | 26% | 45% | 24% |
| MAGA / Make America Great Again | 22% | 14% | 30% | 27% | 18% | 35% | 26% | 15% | 24% |
| Space Force | 23% | 15% | 20% | 24% | 20% | 36% | 25% | 8% | 21.5% |
| Fake News | 35% | 30% | 27% | 24% | 18% | 17% | 15% | 18% | 21% |
| Stock Market | 22% | 15% | 24% | 24% | 18% | 18% | 18% | 20% | 19% |
| Hottest | 31% | 16% | 30% | 17% | 14% | 17% | 16% | 12% | 16.5% |
| Moon Base | 20% | 15% | 22% | 15% | 16% | 15% | 28% | 14% | 15.5% |
| Alien | 16% | 11% | 13% | 22% | 10% | 14% | 13% | 3% | 13% |
| Iran | 15% | 9% | 12% | 12% | 10% | 12% | 14% | 13% | 12% |
| Data Center | 8% | 15% | 13% | 11% | 12% | 6% | 12% | 15% | 12% |
| Afford / Affordable / Affordability | 12% | 12% | 13% | 15% | 8% | 12% | 15% | 8% | 12% |
| Starlink | 12% | 10% | 11% | 11% | 9% | 10% | 12% | 7% | 10.5% |
| UFO / UAP | 8% | 5% | 6% | 6% | 4% | 4% | 6% | 4% | 5.5% |
| Event Does Not Qualify | 5% | 5% | 6% | 5% | 4% | 5% | 4% | 3% | 5% |
| Crypto / Bitcoin | 4% | 4% | 3% | 4% | 3% | 4% | 4% | 4% | 4% |
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: Claude Fable 84% on 508 graded calls · Claude Opus 85% on 578 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 84% on 556 graded calls · GPT 84% on 5,500 graded calls · Gemini 86% on 4,292 graded calls · Kimi 83% on 2,345 graded calls · GLM 81% on 2,367 graded calls · DeepSeek 80% on 2,392 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
Every seat returned a number on all 32 contracts. Four of the 256 second-round answers never came back, and those four keep their first-round number. Every number in this piece gets graded in public once the market settles, and you can check the running tally on the full graded scoreboard.
The One Number That Decides This Whole Board
Everything above turns on a single question the panel had to answer before it could price anything: how long, and how wide, does this President talk at an event like this?
Kalshi has settled 1,397 mention contracts across 46 past Trump events, and that record answers the question with unusual clarity. The share of a board he actually hits swings from near zero to roughly three quarters, and it swings on event format, not on mood. Here are the most recent boards Kalshi settled, with the share of listed phrases he said at each:
| Event | Format | Share of the board he said |
|---|---|---|
| Rally With Senator Darline Graham, Aug 21 | Campaign rally | 22 of 32 (69%) |
| Remarks In Nassau County, New York, Aug 14 | Policy speech at a police academy | 27 of 39 (69%) |
| Remarks In Las Vegas, Nevada, Aug 5 | Campaign-style remarks | 32 of 44 (73%) |
| Real America's Voice Interview, Aug 11 | Long interview | 18 of 33 (55%) |
| Cabinet Meeting, Jul 31 | Open-ended meeting | 17 of 30 (57%) |
| Fox News At Night, Aug 4 | TV interview | 15 of 34 (44%) |
| Roundtable On American Mining, Aug 7 | Single-subject roundtable | 15 of 38 (39%) |
| Executive Order Signing, Aug 3 | Short signing event | 12 of 31 (39%) |
| Tele-Rally With Michael Alfonso, Aug 10 | Phone rally | 7 of 28 (25%) |
| Announcement On Freedom Haulers, Jul 30 | Single-subject announcement | 4 of 29 (14%) |
Kalshi has already run this exact experiment once. On June 18, 2026 it listed a board on a Medal of Honor ceremony, and that board settled at 4 of 28, or 14%. Setting aside events that were cancelled outright, only the Freedom Haulers announcement has ever run quieter, and by a hair: 4 of 29 against this board's 4 of 28. The ceremony is the closest thing to a controlled comparison anybody has, because it is the same event class.
Eight of the phrases on that June board are also on this one. Six of the eight settled NO: Biden, First Term, Election, Nuclear, Democrat and Crypto / Bitcoin. Two settled YES: Oil / Gas / Gasoline and Stock Market. The only other words he reached for that day were Hero / Heroic / Heroism and 250.
| Phrase On Both Ceremony Boards | June 18 result | Market now | Panel now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oil / Gas / Gasoline | Said it | 9¢ / 32¢ | 34.5% |
| Stock Market | Said it | 35¢ / 40¢ | 19% |
| Biden | Did not say it | 64¢ / 85¢ | 63% |
| First Term | Did not say it | 52¢ / 67¢ | 41% |
| Democrat | Did not say it | 48¢ / 73¢ | 29% |
| Election | Did not say it | 35¢ / 49¢ | 31% |
| Nuclear | Did not say it | 28¢ / 61¢ | 41% |
| Crypto / Bitcoin | Did not say it | 3¢ / 13¢ | 4% |
On six of those eight the panel sits under the market, and the one ceremony on record went the panel's way. On Stock Market the panel sits under the market and the ceremony went the market's way. That is the scorecard on the panel's central bet, and it is better than a coin flip without being anything close to proof, because one ceremony is a sample of one.
Keep it in proportion. Across the 43 settled Trump boards that actually qualified for payout, the median board hits 43% of its listed phrases, and the range runs from 6% to 82%.
Across the 31 word contracts, the midpoints on this board imply about 47%. The panel implies about 37%. The single medal ceremony on record came in at 14%.
The Freedom Haulers announcement on July 30 shows the same effect on a different subject, and you can see exactly which four words survived. He said Border, CDL / Commercial Driver's License, Radical Left and Biden, which is the trucking-and-politics core of that specific announcement. At the same event he did not say Iran, China, Election, Stock Market, Tariff, Democrat, Oil / Gas / Gasoline, Crypto or America First. Every one of those settled YES at some point during his rally stretch. They just have nothing to do with trucking.
Kalshi's ledger goes further and splits each individual phrase by whether the event ran long or short. The splits are stark. "Hottest" hits 15 of 22 long events and 3 of 21 short ones. "China / Chinese" runs 16 of 19 long against 4 of 16 short. "First Term" is 11 of 14 long and 2 of 9 short. "Fake News" is 16 of 19 long and 4 of 15 short. "Afford / Affordable / Affordability" has hit 8 of 18 long events and has never once landed at a short one.
Given a medal ceremony with four honorees on a stage, our panel read this board as a short event and priced almost every stump phrase accordingly. Whether that is right is exactly what Friday settles.
One trap worth naming, because it would fool a careless reading of the same data. On August 20 the "Fostering the Future" board with the First Lady settled at 0 of 23, which looks like the extreme short-speech case. It is not. On that board the "Event does not qualify" contract settled YES, meaning the event never met Kalshi's payout criterion and everything else resolved NO by default. That 0% measures a cancelled market, not a quiet President.
Space Force: Where The Panel Bets Against The Market's Only Confident Price
Look down the market column and one contract stands out for being narrow. Space Force is quoted 75 bid against 80 ask, a five-cent spread on a board where fourteen contracts are twenty cents wide or worse. Somebody has actually met somebody in the middle here, at roughly 78 cents.
Our panel put it at 21.5%, which is a 56-point disagreement and by a distance the largest on the board.
The reasoning splits into two parts, and both are checkable. The first is topical. The Space Force is a branch of the military. Artemis II is a civil NASA mission, and the medals are being handed to astronauts, one of whom is Canadian.
Space Force is a military topic outside a NASA civil-space medal ceremony, and it settled NO in all 3 prior Kalshi boards. — Claude Opus
That second half is the other part, and it is straight off the settled ledger rather than out of anyone's memory. Kalshi has listed a "Space Force" contract three times before. It has settled NO three times out of three. Its record is 0 for 3.
The market is pricing the phrase Trump invented as a near-certainty at his own space agency. The panel is pricing the only three times anyone has ever actually run this experiment.
Not every seat was comfortable there. Kimi held highest at 36%, on the grounds that Space Force is the President's signature space achievement and the most naturally on-brand thing he could reach for in that room. DeepSeek went lowest at 8%. If Space Force settles YES on Friday, the panel takes its biggest loss of the day and the ledger reasoning behind it gets a real dent.
Houston: The Panel's Biggest Step Above The Market, On A Contract Nobody Trades
At the other end sits the cleanest disagreement on the board and, in a way, the strangest. Houston is quoted 55 bid against 88 ask. The ask is a hopeful seller, the bid is a cautious buyer, and the two of them are 33 cents apart because not one contract has ever traded.
All eight models landed between 85% and 96%, the tightest cluster anywhere on the board, and all eight held their number through the revision round without moving.
The event is physically at Johnson Space Center in Houston; Trump routinely names the host city in remarks, and Houston is both location and iconic space reference. — DeepSeek
The panel's case is not complicated. He is standing in Houston. Presidents name the city they are standing in. And "Houston" is the single most quotable word in the history of American spaceflight, sitting one sentence away from any Apollo reference he might make.
Kalshi has never listed a "Houston" contract before, so the ledger is silent and every model had to reason from scratch. Seven of the 31 phrases on this board are brand new to the series in exactly that way: Houston, Mars, Apollo, Starlink, ISS, Moon Base and Jared / Isaacman. That is a quarter of the board with no settled history of any kind, which is a large part of why this board is so lightly traded. There is nothing to look up.
Golden Age: The Freshest Phrase, And The Panel Still Shaded It Down
Eight days before the ceremony the White House put the phrase "Golden Age of Space Transportation" in the title of its own fact sheet. The market has Golden Age at 70 bid, 83 ask. The panel came in at 65.5%.
That gap is small, but the reason for it is instructive, because it shows the format rule beating the news rule. Gemini went highest at 82%, arguing the phrase is now the administration's official framing for space and therefore sits inside the ceremony's own subject. Kimi and Fable both landed at 62%, weighing the narrow format harder. Kalshi has listed "Golden Age" four times and it has settled YES twice.
The honest read is that this is the one contract where the panel's own logic cuts both ways, and it priced accordingly rather than picking a side.
Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss
Four contracts trading under 35 cents where at least one seat gave a real number and a real reason.
Oil / Gas / Gasoline (9¢ bid, 32¢ ask; panel 34.5%). The largest positive gap on the board after Houston, and the phrase that actually landed at the June ceremony. Kimi took it to 38% on the view that energy talk attaches easily to a launch-infrastructure argument. Opus went the other way at 16%, calling it a stump phrase with no ceremony hook.
Russia / Russian (9¢ bid, 43¢ ask; panel 34%). Never traded once. Opus was highest at 55%, reasoning that a speech about American space leadership tends to reach for the space race and the space race has a Russian half. Everyone else sat in the low 30s, which is unusually tight agreement for a contract this cheap.
Nuclear (28¢ bid, 61¢ ask; panel 41%). Nuclear propulsion is a genuine part of the Mars conversation. Opus at 52%, Kimi at 50% and GPT at 48% all treated it as live. DeepSeek at 20% treated it as a weapons word that does not belong at a medal ceremony. This is the widest honest split on the board that nobody is talking about, and it settled NO at the June ceremony.
Elon / Musk (24¢ bid, 38¢ ask; panel 24%). DeepSeek was the outlier here at 45%. The rest of the panel came down after the revision round on a specific point of fact: Orion is a Lockheed Martin spacecraft flown on NASA's own rocket, so Artemis II is the one flagship mission that is not a SpaceX story. The phrase is also 0 for 2 in its settled history.
Where The Panel Changed Its Mind
Every seat read the other seven anonymized estimates and could revise or hold. Across 256 second-round answers, 104 moved by two points or more and 148 held. The three most interesting moves, quoted as written:
Peers correctly noted the strict topical separation between NASA's civil missions and the military Space Force, as well as the phrase's 0-for-3 historical record, which invalidates my assumption of broad space-topic crossover. — Gemini, revising Space Force from 70% down to 20%
That is the single largest revision in the run, and it is the reason the Space Force gap is as wide as it is. Gemini started as the market's closest ally on that contract and finished 50 points away from where it began.
Peers correctly distinguish Moon from a stump-speech phrase like Radical Left. It's the topical core fact of what's being commemorated, closer to Border and CDL at the Freedom Haulers event, which hit, than to wide political phrases. — Claude Sonnet, revising Moon from 35% up to 55%
Sonnet had been the panel's lone bear on Moon, applying the short-event discount to a word that is the literal subject of the medal citation. It moved 20 points and still finished as the low seat on the board's second-most-likely word, which is worth knowing if you think the panel is groupthinking its way to consensus.
Forecaster E's reminder that SpaceX did not build Orion convinced me that Musk is topically distant from the specific Artemis II honors, compounding the dampening effect of the narrow event format. — Gemini, revising Elon / Musk from 35% down to 15%
And one that did not move at all. Every seat held its Houston number, and GLM explained why in a way that captures what a convergence round is supposed to do:
All seven peers converged on the same core reasoning I already weighed, host-city naming plus the iconic space-history resonance of Houston, and none surfaced a consideration I had missed, so I hold. — GLM
What Would Change The Panel's Mind
Four concrete things, each with the direction it pushes the numbers.
- The White House adds a policy announcement to the event. If Friday becomes a medal ceremony plus a space-policy rollout, the format changes from narrow to wide, and nearly every stump phrase on this board would have room to move up. Watch the daily guidance for a second agenda item.
- He takes questions. A press gaggle attached to the ceremony is the single fastest route from 14% to 69%. Iran, China, Election and Stock Market all become live the moment a reporter chooses the topic. The panel priced a scripted event with no Q&A.
- A second Artemis or NASA announcement lands before Friday. NSPM-17 was signed August 20. Another space action in the same week would push Golden Age, Mars and Moon Base up and would give Space Force the bridge it currently lacks.
- The ceremony slips or is not carried live. Any postponement or broadcast failure sends the "Event does not qualify" contract up and takes every other word to zero. It is at 2 or 3 cents now, and it settled YES as recently as August 20 on a different board.
When one of these fires, this page gets re-scored.
Settlement Timeline
| What | When |
|---|---|
| Ceremony And Remarks | Friday, August 28, 2026, 11:00 a.m. EDT, Johnson Space Center, Houston |
| Media Credentialing Deadline | Tuesday, August 25, 2026, 5:00 p.m. CDT |
| Contract Expiration | September 12, 2026, 2:00 p.m. UTC, or early on the day the event occurs |
| Panel Verdicts Generated | August 22, 2026, 3:34 a.m. UTC |
| Prices On This Page As Of | August 22, 2026, 4:20 a.m. UTC |
Kalshi's rules close and expire the markets early once the event happens, so in practice this settles Friday. The panel re-scores this page when the story moves.
The Record On This Exact Kind Of Market, Including The Bad Part
There is a reason we can put a number next to a phrase like "Space Force" and expect anyone to care, and it is not that AI models are clever. It is that this panel has been graded in public on mention markets specifically, and the numbers are on the record.
| Model | Graded mention calls | Right on direction | Closer than the market when it disagreed by 10¢ or more |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi | 145 | 77.9% | 17 of 80 |
| Claude Fable | 115 | 76.5% | 28 of 58 |
| DeepSeek | 145 | 73.8% | 26 of 77 |
| GLM | 144 | 72.9% | 17 of 85 |
| Claude Opus | 114 | 71.9% | 20 of 52 |
| Claude Sonnet | 113 | 71.7% | 23 of 71 |
| ChatGPT | 50 | 64.0% | 9 of 22 |
Gemini is the eighth seat on the board above and is missing from this table on purpose: it has no settled mention-market calls yet, so it has no record in this category to print. Its overall record across everything else we grade is the best on the panel.
The first two columns are the flattering ones. The third is the one that matters, and it deserves reading carefully. It counts only the occasions when a model's number sat at least ten cents away from where the market was, and asks how often the model's side of that disagreement turned out to be the closer one.
The number we would rather not print: not one seat clears 50%. On mention markets, when these models have walked away from the price, they have been wrong more often than right.
Across all 445 occasions where a seat's number sat ten cents or more from the market, the panel's side was the closer one 140 times, or 31.5%. That is the whole reason the third column is in this article. Claude Fable is the best of them, closer on 28 of 58 disagreements and is the closest thing this panel has to a specialist in the category. Kimi, which has the best raw accuracy on the board, has one of the worst records when it steps away from the money, closer on 17 of 80.
Mention markets are also simply harder than the rest of what we grade. The panel's Brier scores in this category run between 0.166 and 0.222, against 0.068 to 0.091 across everything else it prices. Lower is better, and that difference is not noise.
So take the 56-point Space Force gap for exactly what it is. It is the panel's honest number, built from a settled record the market does not appear to have consulted, from a group whose track record on disagreements of this kind is worse than a coin flip. That is why we publish the gap and the record together rather than one without the other.
The Room Is Not As Simple As The Medals
One last thing that belongs in any honest account of Friday, and it concerns the man standing next to the President.
Jared Isaacman is a contract on this board at 78 bid, and he is the NASA Administrator. Getting there was not routine. On May 31, 2025, days before a Senate floor vote he was widely expected to win, and after the Senate Commerce Committee had already advanced him with bipartisan support, the President withdrew his nomination. The President pointed to Isaacman's "prior associations," and reporting at the time cited his record of donations to Democratic politicians. Reporting also tied the reversal to the collapsing relationship with Elon Musk, whose company Isaacman had chartered for his private spaceflights. Isaacman's own account of it was blunt: "I was a good, visible target."
He was renominated on November 4, 2025, and confirmed 67 to 30 on December 17, becoming NASA's 15th administrator. Sixteen members of the Democratic caucus crossed to support him, and all 30 votes against came from that caucus.
The agency he now runs has been through a fight of its own. The administration's FY2026 request proposed cutting NASA from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion, taking science funding to $3.9 billion, a 47% reduction that zeroed out more than 40 projects including Mars Sample Return, and taking direct-funded civil servants from 17,391 to 11,853. The Planetary Society criticized the plan in blunt terms, calling it "an extinction-level event for the space agency's most productive, successful and broadly supported activity: science." The backlash was public: NASA employees and members of Congress protested the layoffs and science cuts outside the agency's own centers.
None of that is decoration on a word-counting market. It is the reason a reasonable person could argue the panel is too low on the political half of this board. A President speaking at an agency he has proposed cutting by a quarter, handing medals in front of an administrator he once pulled, has more available material than a ceremony script suggests. That case pushes Democrat, First Term and Biden back toward where the market has them. The panel weighed it and came down on format anyway. Friday shows who was right.
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The Bottom Line
Kalshi has built a 31-word board on a medal ceremony for four astronauts and priced roughly half of it as though it were a rally in an arena. Eight AI models, working from Kalshi's own record of 1,397 settled contracts, came in below the market on 24 of the 31 words and produced a 56-point gap on Space Force, the one contract where the money looks most settled. The only medal ceremony Kalshi ever priced before this one settled at 4 words out of 28.
The board also has almost nobody in it. Eight contracts have never traded, fourteen carry spreads of twenty cents or more, and the entire 32-market board has moved about 4% of the volume of a single contract on Kalshi's Moon-landing ladder. That is what a market with almost nobody in it looks like from the inside, and it is why a panel with a public, graded, mixed record on exactly this category is still worth reading here.
Every number above is stamped and gets graded once Friday settles. Come back and check.
Model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange for event contracts; participation is 18+ and availability varies by state, as of August 2026.
