SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk claimed the Biden-led administration was leaving NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams stranded in the International Space Station and promised to bring them back to Earth “in about four to five weeks.”
Musk gave his comments during a joint interview on Fox News alongside President Donald Trump and Sean Hannity and disclosed they “are speeding up the return of the astronauts,” as requested by Trump.
The Chief of SpaceX accused the last administration of committing him “politically” to abandon them up there. He ranted about President Biden, claiming he had ‘meant’ to abandon them in space.
He called attention to the fact that SpaceX has safely returned astronauts from the space station several times before.
SpaceX flew the Crew Dragon spacecraft to try and rescue the two astronauts in September. The station was reached, but the capsule did not have the authority to land Williams and Wilmore back on Earth.
This duo, which has spent 258 days aboard the space station, was intended to depart after eight days. They were stuck there following a technical failure with their Boeing Starliner capsule.
NASA astronauts dismissed Musk and Trump’s claims
When asked during a CNN interview with Anderson Cooper on Thursday about similar comments that Trump made last month, astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore would respond: “We don’t feel abandoned. We don’t feel stuck. We don’t feel stranded.”
Almost immediately after Cooper’s question, Wilmore said, “I understand how one could believe that. Although we came prepared and committed.”
NASA made it known last week that Wilmore and Williams may come home sooner than they thought. In light of changing elements surrounding the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule used to launch the Crew-10 mission, the launching date for this mission has now been changed to Match 12, “pending mission readiness,” according to a NASA update to its mission blog.
Trump administration has shifted toward avoiding the moon
NASA’s Artemis program has had some hiccups. Boeing, the lead contractor for the SLS, warned employees this month that as many as 400 jobs may be lost, pointing to “revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations.”
Todd Harrison, a space policy expert at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, gauges: “The Artemis program is effectively dead in the water, pretty much as it stood under the first Trump administration.”
Harrison suspects that the who is behind the moon’s withdrawal.
“It sounds exactly like a conversation with Elon Musk whispering in the president’s ear, saying, ‘This is what we got to do.'”
NASA has invested about $40 billion into Artemis. The plan was to send astronauts around the moon by April 2026 with Artemis II, followed by a landing in 2027. Further delays in the development of the SLS and heat shield issues on the Orion crew capsule have extended the timeframes.
According to Thomas Culligan, a consultant and former aerospace lobbyist, “we’re closer than we’ve been since 1972 to having American astronauts, ride and land on the moon.”
