22 thoughts on “Astronaut Versus Astronaut”

  3. If not for the gun grabbing crazy, I’d be highly interested in speculating how Mark Kelly would affect Senate space policy, since he’d almost certainly have to join Richard Shelby and the rest in running the show.

    As it is, I’m inclined to think he would prop up SLS, Artemis, ISS, and the Lunar Gateway, so NASA would become even more of a self-licking ice cream cone. But I could also be completely wrong about that, as I pay no attention to Mark Kelly, and his campaign website doesn’t even mention anything about NASA’s direction, so far as I can tell.

    1. He would probably sell us out to China. A lot of space nerds love China and have a dim view of the USA. So whether it has to do with space or any other issue, he would work to build up China at the expense of the USA.

      1. Here in Kentucky we have a far-left female Marine fighter pilot running against Mitch McConnel for the second time. In between losing races she runs against house members and loses. Democrats through a lot of money into her doomed campaign, and in every primary she edges out electable Democrats who might win, so I’m okay with her. Running for office and losing is basically her post-government career.

        But I wonder why they run her. She’s basically Newman from Seinfeld, in both attitude and appearance. She had “mom hair” by age 30. She brags that she’s further left than anyone in the entire state, and her whole prior career was apparently killing brown people for a paycheck and blaming it all on white people.

        She is not the first fighter pilot I’ve encountered who held this view. The military apparently isn’t filtering out people whose greatest joy would be bombing US cities to kill as many racist and sexist Americans as possible.

      2. “He would probably sell us out to China. A lot of space nerds love China and have a dim view of the USA.”

        Okay I will bite. Why would this be so? Do Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos count as those “space nerds” who love China more than the USA?

        1. Mr. Musk, in all likelihood on account of his arrangement for his Shanghai factory, has turned over whatever technological advantage Tesla has in cars to the Chinese government?

          This possibility has been discussed on Seeking Alpha, and I have not heard any strong counter arguments to this?

          1. Elon has said that foreign governments – I don’t recall if he specified China but everyone knows hjnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggh- steal intellectual property so efficiently that it is of little value.

            (My cat insisted on adding her opinion about China to the previous sentence.)

          2. Tesla’s “technological advantage” in and of itself has no intrinsic value because Musk knows it can’t be sustained. He’s using it like a real estate money pump to feed his real interests while, as a side effect, disseminating a technology he believes in. Musk and Trump both got their economics degrees from the Wharton School, interestingly enough.

          3. It is incredibly questionable for any company to open up manufacturing in China where the key requirement is teaching China how to do things. It has been questionable since the 90’s because there are decades of examples of companies getting stabbed in the back.

        2. There are a lot of space nerds that love China. They look at any concern related to China as a “Red Scare”. They don’t like competition. They view the concepts where China is an adversary or competitor as illegitimate and anything China does as unquestionable because of Western Imperialism. These are the same people who, until a few years ago, loved Russia like they love science.

          They are essentially anti-American and want to apply Progressive Marxist control to all off world activities.

          The Democrats are a Progressive Marxist party. That is their controlling ideology and the people with those beliefs run the party infrastructure, finances, and human resources. All through the Obama years, we heard how awesome China was and if only we could be more like China, just think of all the things Obama could get done. Even now, Democrats are bent on totalitarian schemes to censor and persecute dissidents, radically change the constitution to remove freedoms and checks/balances, and how we need a technocratic elite that controls public policy.

          Kelly is a Democrat and would adhere to party ideology and push Progressive Marxist policies on space related subjects but also in how to deal with other countries like China. Because Kelly has these popular beliefs, he is susceptible to manipulation by countries like China. He also has a lot of business ties to China.

          Both Musk and Bezos are part of the cultural elite and hold a lot of Progressive Marxist views because those views are popular in their social circles. They probably have a more realistic view of China than your typical Democrat and don’t view competition as a dirty word. Even though there is some alignment with the anti-American space nerds, I wouldn’t put Bezos or Musk in that category. The threats/benefits these two have for our country are far different than a politician.

          I think a better question is under what circumstances would Kelly help China (directly or indirectly) at the expense of the USA and the same for Bezos and Musk?

      3. It’s a bit more nuanced than that. A surprising number of space nerds are partisan Democrats/progressives. Many of these seem to have swallowed whole the America’s-inevitable-decline-China’s-inevitable-rise notion. Not all of them seem delighted at the prospect, though some certainly are. The latter strike me as being pretty much standard-issue American oikaphobes who have uncritically bought into pretty much everything they were spoon-fed in our left-captive education system these days. Also, I think, it’s just one more manifestation of the pervasive “glass half-empty” mindset that is all but universal on the American Left.

        There are a fair number of space nerds – and it’s a bi-partisan crowd – who seem to push the China’s-going-to-dominate-space notion because they seem to believe that superpower competition is the only thing that will drive America to move faster on its space aims. I think this attitude is based on a combination of nostalgia for, and tunnel vision about, Apollo. They are wrong in both respects, but this attitude is still fairly widespread. I run into it all the time on various space blogs/news sites.

        1. There’s some subset of space nerds who are Star Trek nerds, and a large subset of Star Trek nerds who are far far left. Those are the ones who believed the Captain when he said “We are peaceful explorers” and ignored the fact that he launched megatons worth of nuclear warheads ten minutes later, because a post-capitalist society would never do something morally questionable.

          The new Star Trek series like Discovery and Picard are getting great user reviews at Trek BBS, yet the number of users seems to have plummeted. I think the franchise is winnowing the fanbase down to the hard core left who despise men, especially white men, and anything that smacks of common sense or logic.

        2. “There are a fair number of space nerds – and it’s a bi-partisan crowd – who seem to push the China’s-going-to-dominate-space notion because they seem to believe that superpower competition is the only thing that will drive America to move faster on its space aims.”

          There is an element to this in how I think of things because I do see us as competitors even if we are playing slightly different games. I don’t know if they will dominate anything. It certainly isn’t fated. But we need to act to defend and nurture our current and future interests.

          So, I don’t think China will own the Moon, but I don’t want them to get all the good spots. Interacting with China in space, like we do on Earth, is inevitable but I don’t want those interactions to take place under the Chinese system. The same is true for any other country. We have to be mindful of these issues but the important thing is that we focus on our own pursuits as motivation for actions. I view this as enabling Americans, and our friends, to engage in a wide array of space based activities limited only by imagination, problems to be solved, and our traditional American views of governance, law enforcement, and property/civil rights.

          We should be moving faster in space and competition with China is one small, but important, item on a long long list of reasons. China is a little different as they are an adversary in many ways terrestrially but good natured competition is natural, beneficial, and isn’t inherently negative. You could swap out China with the UAE or any other country and it would largely be the same. There just isn’t a lot of competition right now.

  5. Kelly opposes going back to the moon and the Space Force. Buzz has gone a long way since he was Obama’s political prop.

  6. I had a chance to talk to Mark Kelly a couple of weeks ago about Space Force. I wouldn’t say he opposes it. More accurate: he wouldn’t have pushed for it, but now that it’s here, he’d like to see it made as efficient as possible, and part of that will be clearly delineating boundaries between USAF and USSF.

  7. What’s good about creating a separate Space Force? I do understand that because of organizational pathologies the Air Force executed the space portion of its mission poorly, but it seems to me the correct solution is to address the Air Force’s problems — which extend far beyond space — rather than to create yet another bureaucracy.

  9. Mark Kelly is a piece of shit scumbag human garbage! And that was *before* he became a Senator! How much lower can this loser go?!

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