President Donald Trump said on Tuesday night that he had requested that Elon Musk’s SpaceX bring back two NASA astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS). For the unversed, the astronauts were already planning to return on SpaceX spacecraft in March.
Earlier on Tuesday, Musk said that Trump had asked him to bring back the two astronauts “as soon as possible,” implying that NASA’s existing return schedule of late March would be altered. “We will do so,” declared Musk.
Trump wrote on Truth Social, “I have just asked Elon Musk and @SpaceX to ‘go get’ the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,” adding, “They have been waiting for many months on @Space Station. Elon will soon be on his way. Hopefully, all will be safe. Good luck Elon!!!”
Two officials said that his demand that SpaceX retrieve veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been assigned a SpaceX ride home since August, was an unprecedented US presidential involvement into NASA operations that took many agency officials by surprise.
However, requests for response were not immediately answered by a NASA representative.
Due to issues with the propulsion system, Wilmore and Williams’ eight-day test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spaceship to the ISS last summer has ended up lasting almost a year.
During the administration of President Joe Biden, NASA decided in August that Starliner was too dangerous to return them to Earth and asked SpaceX to do so on a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
With Wilmore and Williams’ seats unoccupied, the vehicle has already docked with the space station after flying there in September for NASA’s Crew-9 crew rotation mission.
NASA announced in December that SpaceX needed more time “to complete processing” of a new Crew Dragon capsule that will replace the astronauts’ February departure date on Crew-9, thus the planned departure date was pushed out to late March.
An early return might leave the US contingent on the ISS understaffed, as the agency has a carefully planned ISS schedule.
It remained unclear if SpaceX will launch Crew-10 ahead of schedule or if Trump’s demand would result in NASA returning Crew-9 to Earth before the Crew-10 capsule arrives.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who went to the ISS with a Russian crew in September, would be the sole American on board if Crew-9 were to return to Earth before Crew-10 arrived. This is an unusual staffing imbalance that NASA has claimed makes it more difficult to maintain the station’s American components.
According to NASA, Wilmore and Williams, two of the seven astronauts on the ISS, are still in good health and actively engaged in their regular scientific work there.
Some Trump advisers have attempted to place the blame on Biden in recent months, despite the fact that the former president was not involved in the development of Starliner, which has been a recurring problem for Boeing since 2019 due to many engineering issues and cost overruns.
