Photo:Sarah Flowers
Sarah Flowers
Sen. Mark Kelly’s visit to the Kennedy Space Center on Saturday was a homecoming of sorts for the former astronaut, who last visited Cocoa Beach, Florida, in 2011 after commanding the Space Shuttle Endeavor.
Now more than a decade later, Kelly returned to the space center, but this time not to pilot an aircraft.
“I will say that anybody who climbs into a pressure suit and straps themselves to the top of a rocket deserves some recognition,” he adds with a laugh.
Since then, he’s pursued a number of ambitious priorities, such as helping to negotiate a landmark deal that wouldlower prescription drug pricesfor seniors andbacking new limitson lawmakers making stock trades.
He’s also made a point of speaking out on gun violence — something that’s personal for Kelly and his wife, Giffords, who wasshot and nearly killedin 2011.
“I was glad that the president kept the plan from the Trump administration,” Kelly says. “I think this the right thing to do — to allow NASA the runway they need. We will benefit as a country from these Artemis missions.”
Though Kelly himself isn’t on the congressional committee prioritizing the program, he expects he’ll be involved in the program in some capacity — or at least watch from afar.
He is, however, on the Senate Armed Services subcommittee that recently heard updates on a slew of unexplained encounters between military aircraft and unidentified flying objects.
“There are things that have been observed from some really sharp individuals — fighter pilots in the Navy, for instance,” Kelly says. “Stuff that warrants further investigation.”
The former astronaut isn’t convinced, however, that the sightings are extra-terrestrial. It’s more likely, he says, that the strange sightings are the result of a foreign adversary.
“Whether this means we’ve got visitors from somewhere else, I’m not convinced of that yet,” he says. “Sometimes humans make very rapid technological advancement forward. Think of Orville and Wilbur Wright or Wernher von Braun with the first rocket. Even more recently — think of Chat GPT or Open AI. One of the things we need to do is understand whether one of our adversaries has made a technological leap.”
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As for his own leaps forward, Kelly — who retired from NASA in 2011 — is for now busy with life in Congress. Still, he doesn’t rule out another out-of-this-world journey in the future.
“Given the opportunity, yes,” he says when asked if he would return to space. “Will I get the opportunity? That remains to be seen.”
source: people.com
