NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule on Tuesday with a soft splashdown off Florida’s coast, ending an extended stay aboard the International Space Station fraught with technical troubles and Trump’s politics.
Williams and Wilmore left Earth on June 5, 2024, from Cape Canaveral in Florida aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on a mission that was supposed to last eight days. The purpose of the mission was to evaluate if the spacecraft could be used for regular astronaut rotation missions. However, shortly after liftoff, the Starliner experienced multiple helium leaks, which caused the return mission to be halted until further testing could be conducted.
In August 2024, NASA announced that it would be using SpaceX’s Dragon capsule to bring back the astronauts in February 2025. In September, Crew 9 arrived at the ISS with NASA’s Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov and two empty seats for the return of Williams and Wilmore.
Musk and Trump have claimed the Biden administration decided to leave the astronauts on the space station until after the November election to avoid bad publicity.
“They didn’t have the go-ahead with Biden. He was going to leave them in space. I think he was going to leave them in space. … He didn’t want the publicity. Can you believe it?” — Trump on February 18
Since taking office, Trump has claimed he expedited the return of the astronauts after making a personal appeal to Mars Boi Musk.
“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.” — Trump on January 28
The SpaceX CEO has insisted that he offered last year to bring the two astronauts home much sooner but the Biden administration declined for “political reasons.”
Musk — “we are accelerating the return of the astronauts, which was postponed, kind of, to a ridiculous degree,” saying that “they were left up there for political reasons, which is not good.”
When the Commander of the ISS, Andreas Mogensen, refuted Mars Boi’s lie, he was called “retarded.”
Williams and Wilmore have said they were “not privy” to information regarding any offers from Musk to bring them home early.
“We have no information on that though, whatsoever,” Wilmore said. “That’s information that we simply don’t have. So I believe him, I don’t know all those details, and I don’t think any of us really can give you the answer that maybe that you would be hoping for.”
Asked about the claims of political motivations for their extended stay, Wilmore said that Musk and Trump may have information “that we are not privy to.”
NASA also says they were unaware of any offers from Musk to bring the astronauts home early.
Bill Nelson, who served as NASA administrator last summer when the decisions about what to do about Williams and Wilmore were being made, told the Washington Post that the option of an earlier return “certainly did not come to my attention.” Nelson said, “There was no discussion of that whatsoever. Maybe he [Musk] sent a message to some lower-level person.”
Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said, “I think there may have been some conversations that I wasn’t part of.” But he said the option to fly a separate mission to the space station to retrieve the astronauts was “ruled out pretty quickly…. based on how much money we’ve got in our budget and the importance of keeping crews on the International Space Station,” Bowersox said. “They’re an important part of maintaining the station, so we like to keep our crews up there.”
Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said after the determination was made that Williams and Wilmore should not return on the Boeing Starliner, NASA officials met with SpaceX officials and considered “a wide range of options” and ultimately decided to attach the astronauts to the previously scheduled Crew-9 mission.
Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of building flight reliability at SpaceX, said SpaceX was “always ready to support NASA in any way we can.” He said NASA and SpaceX “collectively” came up with “the idea of just flying two crew up on Crew-9, having the seats available for Suni and Butch to come home, and that’s what NASA wanted, and that fit their plans. That allowed them to use Suni and Butch in a very productive manner, make them part of the crew on board station and make really a seamless integration and keep the science going on station and keep pushing research.”
Asked if Trump’s call on Musk to expedite the mission played a factor, Stich, the program manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said that when the schedule for upcoming space missions was laid out, based on when a capsule was ready and a launch pad freed up, “we ended up with March the 12th. And so it really was driven by a lot of other factors. And we were looking at this before some of those statements were made by the president and Mr. Musk.”
