Senator Kelly, Potential 2028 Presidential Contender, Calls All-White, All-Male Space Missions a ‘Disaster’

Senator Mark Kelly, the former astronaut and a vocal critic of President Trump, is facing criticism of his own after telling an audience at Reverend Al Sharpton’s annual National Action Network conference that it would be a “disaster” to have a space shuttle crew comprised of seven white guys like him. Speaking Saturday in a one-to-one interview with Reverend Sharpton at New York, Mr. Kelly, a retired naval aviator who joined the Astronaut Corps in 1996 with his identical twin brother, Scott Kelly, was one of a long list of potential Democratic presidential primary contenders building their credentials among the mostly black audience attending the conference. Asked about diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, Mr. Kelly said diversity helps organizations reach a “much better outcome” than those that do not have variations on race and gender.“The last thing I would want in a space shuttle crew would be seven white guys, U.S. Navy test pilots like me. It would be a disaster. And let me tell you why. The reason it would be a disaster is because we all think the same. We all have the same experience, the same training, the same kind of background,” he said.“The best option in any organization is to have people from different backgrounds, different experiences, and here’s why: because they think about problems differently. They approach things from a different baseline and you get a much better outcome. That was my experience on the space shuttle. I always flew with very diverse crews,” he added. Mr. Kelly flew four space missions between 2001 and 2011, including the final mission of the Space Shuttle Endeavor. He served as the pilot twice, on his first and second missions aboard. STS-108, which had a seven-person crew, included a white female mission specialist Linda Godwin and a Japanese-American male mission specialist Daniel Taki as well as Russian cosmonaut, Yury I. Onufriyenko. STS 121’s seven person crew included two women mission specialists, Lisa Nowak, who is white, and African-American Stephanie Wilson, as well as German national Thomas Reiter.Twice serving as commander, Mr. Kelly said he was able to select his own crew. The first, STS-124, was a seven-member team that included one white female mission specialist, Karen Nyberg, and a Japanese national, Akihiko Hoshide. His final mission, STS-134, was an all white, male crew that included one Italian astronaut, Roberto Vittori. Four of the six on the final crew were U.S. Navy pilots, as a community post noted on X.Mr. Kelly’s comments were panned by several of his critics on X.“The Dem strategy for 2028 is to nominate a white guy who’s willing to trash white guys in an effort to appeal to white guys. I guess it beats the Walz move,” wrote a former federal prosecutor Jonathan Fahey.“I would want the best 7-person team if strapped to a bomb and sent to space. So would he, this is called pandering,” wrote a former CIA targeter, Sarah Adams.At the conference Mr. Kelly also spoke on health care, insider trading in Congress, and the war with Iran. He criticized Mr. Trump multiple times, accusing him of having no plan, timeline, or exit strategy in Iran. “Donald Trump, he is not a strategic thinker,” he said. “Everybody heard the analogy of somebody is playing chess, the other side, and our side is playing checkers. Donald Trump isn’t even playing checkers. You know those red Solo cups? He’s got two of them and he’s moving them around the table.”Mr. Kelly has previously drawn scrutiny from the president, including for his appearance last November in a video that encouraged rank-and-file servicemembers to disobey illegal orders from higher-ups. The video was vague as to which orders he was referring, but came amid Mr. Trump’s deployment of National Guard members at inner cities around the nation to prevent crime. The president called the remarks “seditious” and suggested Mr. Kelly face a court-martial and indictment, but a grand jury refused to charge him. A federal judge also blocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to strip Mr. Kelly of his retirement and demote him from his rank of Navy captain. Mr. Kelly sued in a case that is still in court. “This isn’t about me. This is like about all of us. You know, we all have constitutional rights,” Mr. Kelly said of the lawsuit. “By the way, there are two million veterans whose First Amendment rights are on the line if I give up here.”

Senator Kelly, Potential 2028 Presidential Contender, Calls All-White, All-Male Space Missions a ‘Disaster’

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