Mark Kelly Silent on Firm’s Windfall From Chinese Tech Giant

Mark Kelly, the former NASA astronaut who commanded the second-to-last space shuttle mission and spent 25 years in the Navy, readily acknowledges the myriad threats China poses to the U.S. Earlier this month, he told an Arizona TV station that U.S. intelligence has repeatedly shown China suppressed information about the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak before COVID-19 spread to become a global pandemic.

The interview was part of Kelly’s new mission: trying to oust GOP Sen. Martha McSally, herself an aerospace pioneer as the first female fighter pilot to fly in combat. The clash of the two American flight titans has become one of the most closely watched campaigns in the country.

McSally narrowly lost her 2018 Senate campaign to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, appointed her to fill the seat of the late Sen. John McCain, another legendary fighter pilot who spent five years as a POW in North Vietnam, then went on to win two terms in the House, six in the Senate and his party’s nomination for president in 2008.

McSally in recent weeks has blamed China’s coronavirus cover-up for the death of thousands of Americans as both Republicans and Democrats have tried to distance themselves from the Xi government for its failure to contain the virus.

Last August, in another press interview, Kelly mentioned his national security experience with some of “the space stuff, and satellites” as making him particularly sensitive to the threats from China, along with Iran, North Korea and Russia, with the biggest danger coming from “stuff you can’t see,” an apparent reference to cyberwarfare and less obvious malign activities.

Kelly, however, has been far more reticent about the investment by a Chinese company in a commercial space exploration venture he co-founded.  The company, tech giant Tencent, is one of the world’s largest internet enterprises and owns the Chinese social media platform WeChat. The text platform has more than a billion users and is suspected of monitoring the activity of many of them inside and outside of China.

In the fall of 2014, the CEO of World View Enterprises, the company Kelly co-founded, announced during a visit to Beijing that Tencent had invested an undisclosed sum of money in the Tucson-based space travel venture. In April 2016, as part of a subsequent, $15 million investment round, World View announced that it had received more funds from Tencent, along with three other venture capital firms.

Tencent was already under intense U.S. scrutiny before the COVID-19 world crisis. In addition to the surveillance suspicions, Tencent also sparked a U.S. backlash for suspending its streaming of National Basketball Association games after the Houston Rockets’ general manager praised Hong Kong democracy protests last fall.

Now it’s radioactive. A recent University of Toronto study found that WeChat has been censoring keywords relating to the COVID-19 outbreak since at least Jan. 1. Several prominent lawmakers in recent weeks have deemed Tencent an arm of the Chinese Communist Party and a threat to U.S. national security. Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley in late April introduced a bill aimed at preventing Chinese espionage by prohibiting U.S. federal employees from conducting official business over platforms run by Tencent, Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese companies and barring U.S. tax dollars from being used for any international contracts with those firms.

It’s not just a GOP concern. The United Nations in mid-April backed out of a deal with Tencent to provide videoconferencing and text services at the organization’s 75^th anniversary after U.S. officials, lawmakers and human rights groups complained. Louis Charbonneau, the U.N. director for Human Rights Watch, called Tencent “an enabler of Chinese government oppression.”

U.S. intelligence agencies are also increasingly wary of foreign technology companies operating domestically. Over the last several years, the Justice Department has tried to crack down on Chinese hacking of technology companies through their U.S. offices, incursions that also hit several government agencies, including NASA.

Kelly served as a strategic adviser to World View until launching his Senate campaign last year. He maintains a personal financial stake in the company of between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of non-public stock and $15,001 and $50,000 worth of stock options, according to the financial disclosure records Kelly was required to file in his Senate bid. His eldest daughter also works there as the company’s business opportunity manager.

Additionally, Kelly’s campaign has accepted at least $5,000 from David Wallerstein, who serves as Tencent’s chief exploration officer, responsible for the company’s operations outside mainland China and overseeing business initiatives with multinational partners.

World View originally began operating in 2013 as a space tourism start-up with plans to charge $75,000 per passenger on flights to near outer-space in a capsule attached to a huge helium balloon. But the company has increasingly shifted to contracting with NASA and the Department of Defense to use the balloon, known as a Stratollite, to carry unmanned payloads for extended periods and provide imagery of the Earth with a resolution sharp to five centimeters, far better than satellites can offer.

That increasing dependence on government contracts doesn’t seem to have given Kelly pause about Tencent’s investment. If it has, he’s not speaking up about it. Despite the heightened scrutiny of Tencent in Washington, the Kelly campaign has sidestepped questions from RealClearPolitics on whether he believes the Chinese company’s investment is appropriate and whether the money should be returned.