If the first Turk in space, Alper Gezeravci, has been looking up viral videos during some of the quieter moments on the International Space Station (ISS), he might have been slightly unsettled by the re-emergence of 2021 footage in which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticises the spending of “hundreds of millions of dollars for a few minutes of touristic space travel” while people on Earth starve to death.

Erdogan, as you might expect, was last week praising the four-man mission that has put figher pilot Gezeravci into orbit, despite critics complaining that Turkey has paid Texas startup Axiom Space tens of millions of dollars for the privilege of including its astronaut on the commercial space journey.

However, on October 27, 2021, addressing the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) 8th Ministerial Conference Responsible for Food Security and Agricultural Development, held in Istanbul, Erdogan said: “On the one hand, 810 million people do not have access to the most basic foodstuffs, while on the other hand, large capital owners can spend hundreds of millions of dollars for a few minutes of touristic space travel.”

Opposition Future Party deputy Selcuk Ozdag shared Erdogan’s 2021 video, saying: “This man is always tested with his claims.”

Gezeravci is in fact due to stay in space for two weeks and he and the rest of the crew will conduct more than 30 scientific experiments in microgravity, with many focused on human health and tackling disease.

Nevertheless, Sinan Ciddi, a non-resident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based nonpartisan research institute, with a reference to Turkey’s upcoming end-of-March local elections, described the mission as “not science” and “a cheap election stunt.”

Erdogan, in a message on X, stressed the mission’s alignment with Turkey’s National Space Program, announced in 2021. He pointed to its potential contributions to science across various fields, including astronomy, medicine, genetics and materials science.

The mission’s Crew Dragon vessel, as well as the Falcon 9 rocket that carried the vessel into to orbit, were supplied, launched and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX under contract with Axiom.

Back on Earth, meanwhile, the world of online video was also last week focused on manipulated AI-generated footage that showed Istanbul’s popular opposition mayor Ekrem Imamoglu praising Erdogan's party.

In the national elections of May last year, misinformation on social networks was even spread by Erdogan, who at a rally showed an election video made by the opposition alliance that had been manipulated to include leaders of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK, thus portraying alleged “terrorist” leaders as supporting the opposition.