They were supposed to visit the International Space Station for five days, but now it looks like they’ll be stuck up there for almost a year as the ship that was supposed to bring them home came back empty. That leaves astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams stuck in space.
After billions in government money were spent on the failed mission, a private company, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, was tapped for a rescue mission. This is an embarrassment for the Biden administration, which has dropped the ball on former President Donald Trump’s initiative to build a U.S. Space Force, a far-reaching strategy to reassert the nation’s dominance in the realm of rockets, satellites, and discovery.
The failure of leadership in the space race falls on Kamala Harris, who, as vice president, chairs the National Space Council under a law put forth by President Kennedy at the start of the Space Race. What was once an influential body directing America’s space policy has become a rudderless ship.
Under Trump, the council met eight times, keeping deadlines in place, watching the bottom line, and advancing his bold plan to revisit the moon through the Artemis Program, Apollo’s sister, and send a team to Mars. Equally important, the Space Force was supposed to keep China in check regarding satellites and weaponizing outer limits for their own purposes.
With Harris at the helm, the council has seen her at a single meeting where she breezed in and out after giving a canned speech. Her descriptions of space travel to both adults and children have been ridiculed. And now, after failing to return the astronauts from orbit on NASA’s Calypso space capsule, the Biden-Harris government is forced to turn to Musk and his privately funded Dragon rocket.
“I can't say Kamala Harris made decisions that resulted in the astronauts being stuck, but I can say she didn't make any decisions, and that sure helped result in the astronauts being stuck, and a number of problems that we're facing at NASA and in space in general,” said space expert Gene Autry.
The mission to Mars has been back-burnered as well, Autry said, with the program director giving up and throwing preliminary planning to consultants for $300 million. “Harris hasn't been there to look at it and say, ‘Okay, why does it cost this much?’ or go to Congress and say we need this much money,” Autry wondered. “She doesn't stand up for space in any case because, frankly, they don't care.”
The Boeing company received a $4.2 billion government contract to develop the Starliner program to conduct operational missions to the space station. However, delays and technical issues have led to astronomical cost overruns. As of 2022, Boeing revealed it was absorbing $883 million in losses due to problems with Starliner, including numerous helium leaks and problems with the craft's propulsion system.
“There's plenty of food. We've got water. What we don't have enough of necessarily is oxygen,” Autry said in describing the situation aboard the ISS, which four Americans and two Russians are currently inhabiting. “The CO2 levels build up inside the station and there's a scrubber that removes that. And if it gets above 4,000 parts per million, which is about 10 times what we've got here on Earth, it gets really uncomfortable,” Autry explained.
He added that if Musk’s Dragon rescue falls through, “God forbid if we had to, you can ask the Russians for a ride, which usually costs about $90 million a seat.”
Autry has a new book out, “Red Moon Rising,” which claims that “Space Race 2.0 has started, and the winner—America or Communist China—will define the future of humanity.” With Kamala Harris in charge, the outcome may not be so clear.