Watchdog group: Did inaction by ‘space czar’ Harris get astronauts stranded?

by WorldTribune Staff, September 17, 2024 Contract With Our Readers

In her role as vice president, Kamala Harris is essentially the White House’s lead authority over NASA’s decision-making.

With that in mind, a watchdog group has launched a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) investigation to determine whether Harris’s inaction led to U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams being stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) for several months.

U.S. astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore on the International Space Station. / NASA

The Oversight Project’s executive director told Fox News Digital on Monday that he and his group are seeking emails between NASA political appointees and the White House, including Harris’s office.

Harris holds the title of chair of the National Space Council.

The FOIA filing by Mike Howell, head of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, also demands outgoing emails to Harris’s presidential campaign.

“This looks like to me and other experts that Kamala Harris, the space czar, chose politics over our astronauts,” Howell told Fox News Digital.

“Space is serious business. Kamala Harris obviously has no business running the National Space Council… They’re lost in space right now. Part of the reason they’re lost in space is that our NASA has been turned into another woke-DEI, dismal excuse for a government agency,” Howell said.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX will bring home the two astronauts stranded on the ISS because of troubles with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, NASA announced last month. The astronauts will return to Earth as part of the SpaceX Crew-9 mission in February 2025.

Howell also shared a copy of a document showing “strategic objectives” of the “NASA DEIA Strategic Plan.”

“The fact is that Vice President Kamala Harris’ record as Border Czar is as awful as her record as Space Czar,” Howell told Fox News Digital on Monday.

Howell said it is important that the public see any such correspondence of a political nature between NASA, Harris’s office and/or Boeing because other nations like China are watching for such “sign[s] of weakness.”

“It seems that Harris signaled a willingness to cede America’s space superiority in the name of an effort to ‘save democracy,’ ” he said, suggesting the DEIA priority may jeopardize national security. “When is enough, enough?”

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In its filing, the Oversight Project seeks to compel NASA to share correspondence from agency chief of staff Bale Dalton III, Associate Administrator James Free and five other senior officials. It also seeks communications between NASA and officials in the commercial crew program at Boeing, the company that manufactured the Starliner capsule that took Wilmore and Williams to the ISS this summer, but was unable to bring them home.

The National Space Council (NSpC) was disbanded and reorganized under President Donald Trump.

Trump unveiled the first new branch of the military in decades, the U.S. Space Force, at a 2018 NSpC meeting.

A source close to the matter pointed to the stipulated responsibilities of the NSpC chair, as outlined by Trump in his 2021 executive order establishing the council.

“The Chair shall serve as the President’s principal advisor on national space policy and strategy …” the first stipulation reads.

In a post on X, Howell listed some of the NASA hires made while Harris has led the NSpC, including a veteran of New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, another from the Jacksonville Symphony and an individual whose “scientific” major was “political science.”

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