Well, this is something of a head-scratcher.
On Tuesday evening (Jan. 28), President Donald Trump announced that he has another task for SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, who is already leading a cost- and regulation-cutting effort called the Department of Governmental Efficiency.
"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. 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!!!" Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. The message was also published on X, the social media site that Musk owns.
Presumably, Trump means NASA's Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been living on the orbiting lab since June 2024.
They arrived on the first crewed mission of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, which was supposed to last just 10 days or so. However, Starliner suffered issues with its thrusters, and NASA extended Williams' and Wilmore's orbital stay while it and Boeing studied the problem.
In August, the agency decided not to risk putting the duo on Starliner for the trip home. The capsule would return to Earth uncrewed (which it did without incident in September), and Wilmore and Williams would come home in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule — the vehicle flying the company's Crew-9 mission, which launched to the ISS on Sept. 28.
This decision forced some crew shuffling; NASA had to take two astronauts off the originally four-person Crew-9 launch to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the downward leg. (Both Starliner astronauts are in good health on the ISS, and there are plenty of supplies to support them through the end of their stay, NASA officials have said.)
Trump didn't mention this existing homecoming plan in his post. And neither did Musk, who referenced the president's request before it was published on X.
"The @POTUS has asked @SpaceX to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded on the @Space_Station as soon as possible. We will do so. Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long," Musk wrote in an X post on Tuesday afternoon.
It's unclear what "as soon as possible" means in this context. Crew-9 had originally been slated to come home in late February, but that timeline has been pushed back at least a month so that SpaceX can complete work to ready the Crew Dragon that will fly the four-person Crew-10 mission to the ISS. The Crew-10 Dragon is a brand-new (rather than flight-proven) vehicle, and the company wants a bit more time to check everything out.
Does Musk mean to imply that SpaceX will work to bring Crew-9 home before Crew-10 is ready to launch? NASA probably would not be too happy with that plan, as Ars Technica's Eric Berger noted. It would leave Don Pettit as the only NASA astronaut aboard the ISS for a stretch; he'd have to perform a lot of science and operations work by himself until reinforcements arrived.
Or could SpaceX switch Crew-10's Dragon, swapping it out for a flight-proven one to enable an earlier launch? After all, the company has four Crew Dragons that have carried astronauts to and from orbit before — Endeavour, Endurance, Freedom and Resilience. (Freedom is flying the Crew-9 mission and is therefore already at the ISS.)
It's also possible that Trump and Musk, who has apparently become quite close with the president, are mainly playing politics with the situation. Both blamed the Biden administration for Williams' and Wilmore's extended ISS stay, after all.
Or maybe they're simply trolling, something that both men — perhaps the two most powerful people in the world — very much like to do.
NASA, for its part, said it was still working to return Williams and Wilmore home with the Crew-9 Dragon while proceeding with Crew-10's launch, but did not state if the agency was accelerating its timeline for both missions.
"NASA and SpaceX are expeditiously working to safely return the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore as soon as practical, while also preparing for the launch of Crew-10 to complete a handover between expeditions," Cheryl Warner, NASA's news chief at the agency's headquarters, said in a statement to reporters.
Editor's note: This story was updated at 5 p.m. on Jan. 29 to include NASA's statement on the return of its Crew-9 astronauts and the Crew-10 mission launch.
