This is Jose Vega, New York candidate for the United States Congress from the Bronx’s 15th Congressional District. I have a question for Vice-President Kamala Harris: “Who is stopping NASA from asking for Russia’s help to safely return the two American astronauts currently stranded at the International Space Station?”
The Boeing Starliner spacecraft, flying its first manned space mission this past June, badly malfunctioned. It has left two American astronauts, Barry “Butch” Wilmore, 61, and Sunita “Suni” Williams, 58, temporarily stranded in space for the past two months. Not only do my constituents in the Bronx not know about this—most Americans don’t really know what has been going on, because the real story has been buried by an irresponsible media.
After seven years of delays, and going $1.5 billion above its original budget, the Boeing-designed Starliner spacecraft, on its maiden voyage, failed. This brings up another question, by the way: What has happened to American industrial production capability and quality, including in its space program? Privatization was supposed to make things better, but American companies keep failing—and make no mistake, this is a potentially catastrophic failure.
Kamala Harris is the chairwoman of the National Space Council, as Vice-President. Why isn’t she, or any other Presidential candidate, saying anything about this? Yes, there has been talk about what Space X might be able to do, but there was a failure of the Space X Falcon 9 rocket on July 11. As scheduled now, even when Space X returns to the International Space Station, the two astronauts will have to wait to return on the Space X vehicle in February. They will have to spend eight months in space, instead of eight days!!
I think there is a bigger story here, that everyone is running away from. I think that the $1 trillion American war budget—which is mistakenly called the “defense” budget—may be 75% composed of fraud through price markups, cost overruns, and outright crime. The Stimson Center said in a report issued July 16, “Even with a near trillion-dollar Pentagon base budget, the military leaves service members with equipment that doesn’t work, while padding record-breaking profit margins for military contractors.” Ask yourself: how is Russia able to produce five or six times more ammunition than all of NATO, yet it only spends a fraction of what the U.S. does on its military?
The Russian economy, despite all the sanctions, is doing fine, so that means that the military budget does not represent an oppressive burden on the Russian people, which is about to bankrupt them. But the United States, which is supposed to be saving “democracy” all over the world, is producing far less than Russia, with ten times the acknowledged military expenditure, let alone our secret military budget, which could be twice that size. Dwight Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” is now a military-financial complex, no longer dominated by companies like the once productive Boeing, but by a few multi-trillion-dollar financial predators, like BlackRock.
Are these forces, and their political lackeys, behind the scenes, influencing whether we unnecessarily risk the lives of our astronauts? On Aug 15, Time magazine reported: “You wouldn’t get on a plane if your probability of not making it home alive was 1 in 270. Those odds, however, are what NASA considers an acceptable LOC—or loss of crew—projection for a 210-day stay aboard the International Space Station.”
Is that really NASA—or the Biden Administration’s State Department? The Russians have the Soyuz spacecraft, and they have been back and forth to the ISS more times than anyone. Yuri Borisov, head of the Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said on August 15, “American colleagues are having trouble with the Starliner spaceship, they do not know how to land their crew, so we are in constant dialogue.”
Is America gambling with the lives of its astronauts, just to not have to rescue them with the help of Russia? Or is it worse—does Kamala Harris not have time to be bothered, because she’s too busy trying to secure the Democratic coronation—not “nomination”—for President? Or, is it even worse—does she not care, or, perhaps, not even know? Well, I do. The first person I ever intervened against was Kamala Harris back in 2021, when she came to the Bronx with an attitude of “benign neglect” toward America’s inner-city population. She pledged to meet with me right after that meeting, and never did.
I have a plan, called the “Space Civilian Construction Corps (CCC.)” It’s a way to integrate rebuilding places like the Bronx with the Army Corps of Engineers and NASA to simultaneously address the skills and employment crisis among youth, the sorry state of our infrastructure, and the need for a new generation of engineers and others to work, if qualified, on the frontiers of science. It is a program of hope, not of tragedy and despair, like politicians always offer when they want to be elected again by the same people that they deplore and detest the rest of the time.
So I say, let’s start the interventions up again! Our astronauts have been stranded there for two months. Our military is completely corrupt and needs investigation and overhaul. We need “action, and action now.” Lives are in the balance. So: what are you prepared to do, Madame Vice-President?