US President Donald Trump says he has asked SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to retrieve two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station since Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft returned to Earth without them in September.
“I have just asked Elon Musk and @SpaceX to ‘go get’ the two brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this week.
“We will do so,” Musk responded on his preferred social media platform, X. “Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.”
The exchange occurred despite NASA already organising a flight back to Earth for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. In August, the pair were assigned seats on a SpaceX Dragon capsule now scheduled to leave the ISS in March.
Wilmore and Williams’ eight-day test trip to the ISS has lasted nearly a year because of problems with the craft’s propulsion system.
In August, NASA decided the technical issues with the Starliner spacecraft, Boeing’s first crewed spacecraft flight, made it too risky to have astronauts onboard for the return trip to Earth. The spacecraft returned unmanned without incident.
The Dragon capsule tapped to bring Wilmore and Williams home is already at the ISS, having flown there for NASA’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission in September.
An earlier February departure from the ISS was delayed because SpaceX wanted more time to get an updated Dragon capsule ready. The updated capsule will ferry the Crew-10 mission up to the ISS and effectively replace the current capsule docked there.
However, it is unknown whether Trump’s request this week will cause NASA and/or SpaceX to bring the March departure date forward.
