While I don't agree with the OP, it does seem to be gratuitous bashing of Cruz. AFAIK what he's pointing out is that NASA was chartered to explore space (the NOAA, not NASA, was chartered to do climate research), and yet in my entire lifetime, apart from the 1970s-era Space Shuttle, the only thing of note they've managed to do in this area is launch a few remote/robot probes. Holy fsck, this is an organisation with an $18 billion/year budget that's done basically nothing to further getting mankind into space since the Apollo program ended over forty years ago. They've been busy dicking around with various expensive toys for the last several decades, cancelling one pie-in-the-sky project after another, and presumably will be relying on some of their huge budget to eventually rent room on Russian, or Chinese, or Indian, or whoever else gets there, missions to the moon or Mars.
Looked at another way, if some pro-science senator came along and told them to get their s**t together, would there be such an outcry?