Former astronaut Terry Virts talks about his Senate run, Trump and the NASA budget in exclusive Space.com interview (video)

“Just looking at what’s going on in the world, what’s going on in our country, this disaster from the Trump administration, the chaos and division that’s happening — I just couldn’t stand by and watch this. I had this moment in space. It’s been a few years. We were on the Russian segment. We were having dinner, and we looked down at Earth, and I said, ‘You know what, guys? There’s six of us up here, and there’s over six billion people over there on that planet.’ The Russians have this big window [from which] you can see [Earth]. I said, ‘We’ve been given something really special.’

“I have this kind of philosophy: To those whom much has been given, much will be expected.’ And I’ve been given a lot. You know, thankfully, my country, the taxpayers have made me an F-16 pilot and a NASA astronaut. I spent seven months in space. So, I’ve been given a lot, and I feel like this is a time when things have gotten so bad that it was time for me to serve again. So I threw my name in the hat. I know it’s big. I jumped into the deep end of the pool by running for U.S. Senate. But I think the moment requires leadership.”

“Either as a fighter pilot, or a test pilot, or an astronaut, you’re part of a team. You don’t care about other people’s politics, you don’t care about their religion or their gender or anything. You care about getting the mission done. In fact, we had a conversation about that with the Russians. I was there when they first invaded Ukraine. We could see bombs going off in Ukraine. It was awful. And I said, ‘Look, guys, we need to stay alive. We’re in outer space, so we need to focus on our mission, and we’ll leave politics on Earth for later on.’ So, that’s your job. Your job is to get the mission done — to solve the problem. You’re not worried about politics. And I think having that mentality in Washington will be really refreshing.

“I’m not going there to be on this team to fight the other team. And that seems like all you hear. Whenever you turn on Fox News, that’s constant. The only thing they talk about is bashing Democrats. Or, on the other networks, they just talk about, ‘Whatever Trump does is bad,’ and I don’t look at it that way. I look at like, ‘What’s the problem?’ We need to solve healthcare. We need to solve the debt. We need to solve the global security issue. How do we solve that? I’m running as a Democrat, but really, I’m an American first, a Texan second and a common-sense Democrat third. So I’m going to approach problems as how to solve them, not how to just win one for my team.”

“It is a disaster. You know, NASA’s budget overall is cut by a quarter — this is proposed — and the science budget is cut by half. Here in Houston — you know, I’m from Houston — it’s going to be a disaster. Thousands and thousands of people are going to lose their jobs. They’re already having profoundly negative effects on the space station’s science ability — the ability to do science on the International Space Station that I helped build and commanded. They are going to cut important space probes. I saw there’s going to be 41 space missions that are canceled. There’s over a dozen space missions that are currently in operation, things like New Horizons, Juno and others that are costing pennies on the dollar. These things are super cheap. We’ve already paid all the expense. We should just keep them operating, and they’re going to cancel those. It’s just a disaster.

“It’s really, really bad. A lot of people watching Space.com I think care about space. Please call your congressmen, please call your senators. Please call the White House and let them know that this is ridiculous and you expect something better out of America. It’s a disaster.”

“Absolutely. Look, you can’t start and stop a space program. Here in Houston, they’re canceling several of the most important science ones. Once the hardware is canceled, once the scientists are gone, you can’t just start them up again. Solar system probes require engineers to understand very technical things, to work for years on a program. Once you let someone go, you’re not just going to get them back. They’re going to get hired by some other company, and they’re going to move on with their life.

“Kids who are in school right now at Texas A&M, University of Texas, at Rice, you know, they’re studying and they’re thinking, ‘OK, do I go work at NASA? Do I go work in the aerospace industry? Do I go to Silicon Valley to develop a new app?’ The desire to go work at NASA is going to be less than it once was when they see this chaos. So the problem is not just, in the short term we’re losing these missions. The problem’s in the long term. There’s going to be real damage done to our national security.

“What we’ve really been lacking is a coherent vision that is bipartisan, that everybody agrees on. There’s been entirely too much politicization of our space exploration program. That’s insane. Republicans and Democrats and Independents generally, for the most part, love space exploration. And so I think it comes back to complete lack of vision. And this goes back to the chaos that is Donald Trump. Whenever his neurons fire, he says the latest thing, and this chaos going back and forth is not a way to run a space program.”

“Morale has never been lower. NASA has always [been] voted the top, or one of the top agencies to work at in the government. It was a great place. Some of the best people I’ve ever met work at NASA. They’re awesome. And morale has never been lower.

“Even when they canceled the Constellation program, which was a pretty low point in 2010; even when the Columbia accident happened, that was terrible, it was a tragedy, but we knew we were working towards something better. So, right now, it just feels like they’re not valued. They’re being told, ‘Please leave the government.’

“I have several friends that I’ve talked to that are taking these early outs that Elon Musk offered to federal employees to please leave the government. They were going to retire anyway. These are people that were literally on their way out anyway. They just got a few months of free pay. So this genius ‘get rid of government employees’ plan is just wasting government money. With the role that Elon Musk had at DOGE, the problem is, he had absolute power over seemingly the entire American government.

“And the real fundamental problem: Elon Musk donated $300 million to the Trump campaign, and all of the sudden, he’s given the keys to the United States government. He’s earning billions and tens of billions of dollars-worth of government contracts. He’s given all the insight into the federal government. His A.I. company is given all the data of the United States government. We don’t even know the damage that’s been done to the privacy of American citizens. So the corruption that’s happened cannot be overstated. I mean, the corruption that’s happened in this Trump administration gives the word ‘corruption’ a bad name.

“Imagine on your ethics training, if question 1 was, ‘Are you allowed to give the president hundreds of millions of dollars,’ and then, ‘Is he allowed to give you billions of dollars worth of contracts?’ Like, of course that’s unethical. Of course it’s a conflict of interest. Of course it shouldn’t be happening, and of course it is happening. So it’s hard to have confidence in what NASA is doing with this level of corruption and conflict of interest.”

“No, nothing is ever irreparable. It can be solved. It can be fixed, but it’s going to require leadership in Congress. Right now, what I see from John Cornyn, our senator in Texas, is just a rubber stamp. Whatever Trump does, he approves. It’s the most disgusting thing — prostrating himself. So it’s going to require leadership from Congress to say, ‘No, this is not what we’re doing. We’re going to properly fund our space program. We value the scientists and engineers and astronauts that work there, and the same thing for all the other government agencies.’ It’s going to require leadership in the Senate. Right now, that leadership is lacking.”

“When I’m in the Senate, here in Texas, the first thing I’m going to do is, I’m going to go talk to Ted Cruz. Ted and I probably don’t agree on very much, but I want to talk to him and say, ‘Ted, what can we do to help Texas out? What can we do? How can we work together to help the country out?’ I think space exploration is one of those things. To have a coherent vision and plan for NASA, and really all of our science — National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation and others — you have to have a bipartisan agreement. These things are not political.

“We can fight all day on immigration. Let’s fight all day on tax cuts for billionaires and on supporting Russia instead of Ukraine. We can have that fight. But for space exploration, we need to work together and we need to take the Democrat hat off, put the American hat on, and work together. So that’s going to be the first thing that I want to do as a U.S. senator.”

“So first of all, I want to say hats off to SpaceX. They’re amazing. You know, they’ve been providing cargo to the space station for over a decade. They’ve been launching our astronauts now for several years. In fact, they’re the only American-approved solution for launching astronauts right now. Hopefully Boeing will get in the mix, but SpaceX has done amazing things. The Falcon 9 has basically dominated the global launch industry. The Falcon Heavy is really the premier heavy-lift vehicle in the world. So SpaceX has done amazing things. Starship has had some problems. I’ve got some thoughts on that, but my hat is off to SpaceX.

“The employees — what they’ve done is amazing. And frankly, Elon Musk built an amazing company. So we want them to succeed here in Texas. We want them continue to help NASA. Not only NASA, but the military and other agencies in the government that use their services. So SpaceX is very important. What we need to do is separate the politics and get rid of the conflict of interest.”

“I’m glad that they’re spending money and developing rockets. Like I said, without the Falcon 9, the US government wouldn’t be able to accomplish its missions. Bezos is working on New Glenn. New Glenn is going to be an important rocket. So I’m glad that they’re spending their time and talents and efforts. They employ thousands of engineers and scientists and all kinds of workers here in Texas and around the country. So I’m glad they’re doing that.

“A bigger problem is the rise of these billionaires and mega centibillionaires. There’s a lot of ethical issues of, ‘Are they becoming more important than the government?’ They’re unelected people that are exercising supernational powers, and so that is something that we have to deal with.

“NASA’s job, generally, is not to design new rockets. We hire other companies to do that. I think the key is that we do a public-private partnership well. If we do public-private partnerships well, we allow the American private sector to innovate. No one does that better on planet Earth than America, and a lot of that happens right here in Texas. And we allow the government to efficiently manage and provide funds to these companies. If we can do the public-private partnership well, I think that’s the key to space exploration in the future. But in the short term, I’m glad that they’re putting in the effort. I think we all benefit from growing the space exploration industry.”

“I think that it’s really important for America to send humans back to the moon first, not just to beat our chests about how we’re better than everybody else, but really the reason why we make it to the moon is because of our goodness — because our system of freedom and liberty and, yes, sometimes chaos, is a better system than China.

“You see a lot of people coming here to go to school at Harvard, or University of Texas, or Texas A&M, or wherever. You don’t see people beating down the door to go to China. So I think the reason why we need to be the first back to the moon is not just a technical reason. I think it’s really to shine the spotlight on why freedom and liberty and democracy are better than tyranny and oppression. Humanity is kind of at a crossroads right now. Democracy is not doing great, and these authoritarian regimes seem to be on the rise. And this is one way for us to show that, no, democracy is the better way.

“The big thing about national security and the moon: There are a lot of technical things. The capability to launch heavy-lift vehicles and to operate on the moon, and just the ability to do this mission shows that you’re a pretty capable nation. I mean, so far, there’s been an N of one; it’s been America only who’s been able to do that. So it does show your technical prowess. Space security and assured access to space is really important.

We just had this mission in Iran. That mission was incredibly complicated. I’m so proud of the United States Air Force. That was a tough mission to fly over — 100 airplanes, 30 hours — It was a complicated mission. They did a great job. Every aspect of that mission depended on access to space, so our access to space needs to be at the absolute top of our national priorities.

“Congress needs to work on that in a bipartisan sense. I don’t care [about political affiliation] — I’m going to work with Republicans, Independents on this and make sure that we have very strong, assured access to space.”

“Foreign policy in general, I think, has been an absolute disaster in the last few months.

“I’ll brag on Texas a little bit. The trade that Texas does — the imports and exports in Texas alone — if that were an economy and a nation on its own, it would be in the top third of global economies. So Texas really benefits from trade, and we really benefit from this American rules-based order that has worked really well in the world for the last 80 years.

“In just a few weeks, Trump was damaging that. You know, really taking a hammer to the foundation of what we built: Siding with Russia against our friend, Ukraine, and so on. So I think foreign policy is very important, and we need to get back to promoting American values, having a values-based foreign policy and not a transactional-based foreign policy. This is not some Manhattan casino that [Trump is] going to put out of business. This is foreign policy, this is relationships, and we need to focus on American values and not transactionalism.”

“One of the challenges is that it’s such a big state. I mean, if Texas were a country, we would be the eighth-largest economy on Earth. Texas is basically a continent of its own. When you see it from space, it is gorgeous. You know, there’s the deserts of West Texas, the hill country, and you can see the big forests in the East and the beautiful Gulf of Mexico. So, Texas is kind of everything.

“So one of the challenges for me: I’m going to be putting a lot of miles on my truck, driving around the state. But you know what I found here in Texas? Texans are very practical people. We’re very common sense. And there is a real hunger for honesty, for politicians to just speak the truth, to just give us some straight talk. And they’re kind of fed up with D.C. politics. The Democratic Party in D.C. has been a disaster. It needs to get better. The Democrats that I know here in Texas want something new. So I think that’s going to be a positive thing for my message, because I want to be a common-sense Democrat and not a D.C. Democrat, and that’s going to be my focus going around the state.

“A big differentiator between me [and other candidates] is that I’m not a politician. I haven’t been a congressman for years. I didn’t work in the Obama administration. I haven’t been a traditional Democrat, and my background — who I am as a man — is somebody who solves problems. I’m a fighter pilot and a test pilot. So I’m going to go to Congress not as a Democrat. I’m going to go to Congress as an American and as a Texan to solve problems and get things done.

“So, I think just my background is completely different than many of the other folks who might enter this race. Right now, I’m the only declared person in the Democratic primary, as far as I know. But I think that’s that’s the big differentiator. It’s just who I am as a fighter pilot and test pilot and astronaut, and not a politician.

“You know, my mom, my dad, my aunts and uncles — nobody ever went to college. I was the first one to go to college. My mom was a secretary. She actually worked at NASA Goddard [Space Flight Center] when I was a kid. My uncle worked at Northrop Grumman as a union guy. My cousin works there now as a union guy. So I come from a union family, or working-class family.

“I was an astronaut. That’s a really unique thing, I’ll grant you that. But I also grew up in a working-class family. I mean, I worked in an orchard when I was 15 years old, picking apples and pumpkins. So, I come from a working-class background. I just happened to spend seven months in space.”

“Here’s my one goal: I’m going to represent Texans.

“I’m going to represent all Texans. I’m going to be honest with them. I’m not going to be a politician. I’m going to tell them the truth. I don’t have a magic wand that I’m going to wave to solve all their problems with one bill. That doesn’t exist. I don’t care if they vote for me or not, if they’re Republicans, Democrats, independents — I’m going to represent all Texans, and I’m going to try and bring some sanity back to D.C., some common sense.

“Let’s solve problems. Let’s not be mean-spirited. Let’s not be a bully, like this current administration just bullies people around, just spewing hate. The presidential press conference on the White House lawn yesterday you can’t even put on Space.com because of the profanities that the President was screaming. So I’m going to try and bring that temperature down and actually solve problems. I’m going to focus on the economy, healthcare, education — things that people care about, and not on this political bickering and just stabbing the other side with a ‘gotcha.’ I want to solve problems for Texans.”