Ex-NASA Astronauts Launch Campaign to Boost Midterm Voter Turnout

108 retired space explorers plan 60-campus tour for Vote for Freedom initiative

More than 100 retired NASA astronauts launched Astronauts for America, a nonpartisan advocacy group, on July 20 at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, the 57th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The group’s Vote for Freedom campaign aims to boost voter turnout ahead of November’s midterm elections, with plans to visit roughly 60 college and university campuses, many in swing states, to target young and first-time voters.

The group includes 108 members, according to astronaut Cady Coleman, who flew two space shuttle missions and spent 180 days in space, including a tour of duty on the International Space Station between 2010 and 2011.

“All 108 of us, we’re very different people from each other,” Coleman told the Guardian. “Some of us have very different politics and we certainly each have our own opinions about the current administration, about past administrations.”

“The fact is now we’re all together, and what we’re fighting for is something that’s common to all of us, we’re fighting for our country, for our democracy, and for decision making, and restoring the faith in our institutions,” she said.

Coleman compared voting to spacecraft navigation, saying, “Every one of these voters can change the course of our nation, it’s like making a course correction in space.” Fellow astronaut Ron Garan provided a similar analogy, according to Coleman: “a small adjustment now is a large distance later, like getting to the moon or not.”

The group includes dozens of space shuttle crew members, including Charles Bolden and Bill Nelson, both of whom served as NASA administrators, with Nelson also serving as a U.S. senator. The oldest member is Rusty Schweickart, 90, who flew on Apollo 9 in March 1969, four months before the first moon landing. Linda Godwin, a scientist who flew four shuttle missions between 1991 and 2001 and conducted two spacewalks, serves on the group’s steering committee.

Bolden, a retired Marine Corps major general who flew four shuttle missions and served as NASA administrator under President Barack Obama, expressed concern about the direction of the country.

“All of us have been kind of watching the deterioration in the US over the last few decades,” he said. “It seems like every president issues more and more executive orders because they can’t get action out of Congress, or they don’t want action out of Congress.”

Bolden said that “failure to adhere to the constitution the way we think the framers intended it” placed the country in peril, alongside what he described as more recent assaults on democratic norms by the Trump administration.

“We may not make it if we don’t do something now,” Bolden said. “We may not have another presidential term to try to make a difference.”

Godwin said the astronauts’ background provides a unique platform for the message. “As astronauts, perhaps we would have a voice,” she said. “Not that we’re necessarily more knowledgeable or smarter or anything like that, but we have a background in which we participated in big missions that depended on truth and accountability, and evidence, and trust.”

“We worked with people who have many different opinions on different things, and we know how to work together to get the mission done,” she said. “And we kind of felt like, you know, right now, we think our country is the mission.”

Ellen Ochoa, a four-time shuttle flier who became the first Latina in space in 1993, said the group is focusing on college campuses because for many students “this might be their first opportunity to vote, or they may not be in the habit of voting.”

“It’s important to speak up when things are happening in our country that are moving us away from the democratic society that we all grew up with, and that we all supported as government employees as well,” Ochoa said.

The group intends to “grade” midterm congressional candidates on their commitment to constitutional principles, according to Godwin. The astronauts agreed on a single space-themed statement to encapsulate the campaign’s purpose: “Going to the polls is one small step for you, and one giant leap for our country.”