President Trump blamed the Biden administration Tuesday for “abandoning” two astronauts who have been stuck aboard the International Space Station in the wake of problems last summer with their Boeing Starliner capsule.
In a post to his Truth Social platform, the president said he has asked SpaceX founder Elon Musk to “go get” the two “brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden administration. 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!!!”
For his part, Musk had written in an earlier post on his own social media platform X that Mr. Trump had asked SpaceX to get the Starliner astronauts home as soon as possible, adding that “we will do so. Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.”
Mr. Trump’s post made it sound like Musk himself would be going to space, adding to widespread confusion about what was being planned, in part because the astronauts in question, Starliner commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and co-pilot Sunita Williams, are not “stranded” in any conventional sense, and have not been “abandoned” in space.
They could return to Earth anytime NASA so decides, riding down in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that carried two station crew members to orbit last September with two empty seats specifically for Wilmore and Williams.
They blasted off aboard the Starliner capsule last June 5 for a presumed eight-to-10-day mission. It was the first piloted flight of a Starliner, a key step toward beginning service as an operational alternative to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.
But the flight was marred by propellant leaks and pressurization problems with the Starliner’s propulsion system.
After multiple extensions to carry out tests and analyses, NASA managers decided on Aug. 24 to leave Wilmore and Williams aboard the station for an extended stay, bringing the Starliner down under remote control, without its crew, on Sept. 7. There were no major problems.
The decision to keep Wilmore and Williams aloft on the station was made by NASA management based on a risk assessment and a desire to minimize long-range disruption to the carefully choreographed schedule of crew rotation and cargo delivery missions.
In any case, in the wake of NASA’s decision, SpaceX launched a four-seat Crew Dragon spacecraft to the space station on Sept. 28 with just two crew members aboard — NASA’s Nick Hague and cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov — leaving two seats available for Wilmore and Williams.
NASA opted to carry out a normal long-duration stay by Hague and Gorbunov, who launched with an expectation of returning to Earth at the end of February with Wilmore and Williams. All of that was known last September.
The return flight was later delayed an additional month or so to give SpaceX more time to ready a new Crew Dragon capsule for launch on its maiden flight to ferry a replacement crew — Crew 10 — to the station.
As it now stands, Crew 9 commander Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams are expecting to return to Earth at the end of March. By that point, the two Starliner astronauts will have logged around 300 days in space. Both astronauts have said they understood NASA’s decision to extend their mission.
As the founder of SpaceX, Musk was certainly aware of those decisions when they were made and the rationale behind them. There have been no reports of any direct involvement of the Biden administration in the decisions to extend the Starliner crew’s stay in space, and Musk offered no criticisms of NASA’s decision at the time.
As for what returning the Starliner crew to Earth “as soon as possible” might mean, the only obvious answer would be to bring Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams down ahead of schedule. They would not need anyone to come get them.
But an early departure would leave a single U.S. astronaut behind on the space station: Don Pettit, who launched to the lab last year aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft along with two Russian crewmates.
NASA would then have just one astronaut on board the station to operate the multi-module U.S. segment of the lab, likely halting research in its tracks until Crew 10 could arrive aboard the next Crew Dragon.
Rumors indicate the Crew 10 Dragon could be facing additional delays. NASA could opt to move the next station crew to a Crew Dragon earmarked for a commercial trip to the station carrying a crew sponsored by Houston-based Axiom Space. That might move the Crew 9 return up a few days, but not by any significant amount.
A Crew Dragon that will be used for a commercial space tourism flight around Earth’s poles this spring is not believed to be an option because it is not equipped with a space station docking mechanism.
