US Must Return to Space Program: Tenney

Threats from China mean it's vital for the United States to return to its focus on the space program, even with the explosion of Elon Musk's SpaceX Starship minutes after its liftoff this past week, Rep. Claudia Tenney, a member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, said Sunday.

"There's always trial and error," the New York Republican said on Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures." "We're going back into new frontiers. Kudos to Elon Musk and his team for even getting this rocket off the ground."

But China is looming at a time when the United States has "kind of dropped the space program," said Tenney.

"Recently the NASA administrator said that China could very well try to take sovereignty over the moon which is a violation of a United Nations treaty," said Tenney. "We've agreed as nations not to have sovereignty over the moon or other planets such as Mars. But this is the beginning, and we have to keep up."

Last year, China sent a supersonic missile around the Earth, but it took a press release for the United States to find out what was happening, said Tenney.

"Even though we're dominating in satellites, China can produce, attack satellites," said Tenney. "They're able to scramble our signals, and this is an important technology. We have tremendous people and scientists working for us, but we need to continue to allow the private sector and public-private partnerships with NASA to make this happen and to make us dominant."

China, though, was able to fly a balloon across the United States this year "without us even acting until it already collected its data," she added.

Tenney also commented on China's new power broker role, including its efforts in bringing Iran and Saudi Arabia to a peace agreement.

"This happened because China provides over 80% of the resources to Iran, so Iran is dependent on China," said Tenney. "China's foreign policy is transactional. They don't care about the ethics of what Iran is doing."

Further, the Saudi Arabians look to America, but President Joe Biden has insulted the nation as being a "pariah," said Tenney.

"Certainly Saudi Arabia has its flaws, but they're a much better ally to us than Iran is," said Tenney. "I came out with a report because back in 2021 under the National Defense Authorization Act, the Biden administration was compelled to come out with a report stating the status of the Iranian military. They didn't do that."

Tenney said her report is about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, "that's a quasi-military, a terrorist organization within Iran where billions of dollars of Iranian money is diverted to support them."

The IRGC quashes rebellions, oppresses its country's citizens, and supports terrorist proxies all over the world, including in Yemen and Lebanon," you name it," said Tenney.

"They're all over the world," she continued "They plot foreign terror where they're talking about the assassination of Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and other people in the United States, a very dangerous group."

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