News conferences outside the Capitol don’t always attract a crowd of visitors and tourists — but most also do not feature astronauts in flight suits.
“Sometimes I think, you know, NASA is the Dolly Parton of … government agencies. Like everybody loves Dolly Parton,” Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat and former astronaut, said, flanked by the crew of Artemis II, the planned mission to return humans to the surface of the moon.
The crew, which includes three Americans and one Canadian, has been making the rounds on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in Washington to promote the mission and funding for space exploration in general.
