Donald Trump recently made a presidential campaign video politicizing the accomplishments earned through many years of hard work by the NASA and SpaceX teams. This campaign video, created on June 3rd, implies that the return of crewed launch on U.S. soil is solely to the credit of his Administration. This implication is untrue; the NASA Commercial Crew Program has been around since the Obama Administration (started in 2011) in its current form, and its roots go back to the Bush Administration. Further, NASA and the space industry as a whole have long tried to stay out of politics, and, until this Administration, that goal was at least partially attained. The implication that any one person was responsible for the SpaceX-NASA Crew Demo-2 launch is an insult to the work of the teams that meaningfully contributed to its success.

I will not link the video here, but it even involves a variation his campaign’s well-known slogan: Make Space Great Again. This group of signatories stands for the position that it is wrong for this scientific achievement, as well as NASA and SpaceX video footage, to be used for political showmanship.