Donald Trump criticizes Joe Biden for abandoning astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore at the ISS and asks Elon Musk to rescue them with the help of SpaceX

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, said Tuesday on the social media site X that President Donald Trump had asked SpaceX to intervene in order to save two astronauts who had been left stranded by the Biden Administration.

However, NASA had already established such a plan months prior when it requested that SpaceX return astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from the ISS as part of its Crew-9 mission. Then, in December, mission teams said they needed more time to prepare a new SpaceX vehicle, so they announced a delay in that plan.

The two astronauts who are stranded on the @Space_Station need to be brought home as soon as possible, per the @POTUS' request to @SpaceX. "We will do so," Musk writes in his post. It's awful that the Biden administration abandoned them there for such a long time.


President Trump reaffirmed the statement in a post on his social media account, Truth Social, referring to "the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration."

The post says, "They have been waiting on @Space Station for many months." "Elon will arrive shortly. I hope everything stays safe. Elon, good luck!

Although Wilmore and Williams' circumstances are unique in that they were unable to return home on the Boeing spacecraft that transported them to the station, their return trip is expected to be rather ordinary because they are scheduled to fly home with other astronauts as part of a crew rotation, as quoted in a report by CNN.

Did NASA really abandon the astronauts?

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, which took off from Florida in June 2024 and had a difficult voyage to the International Space Station, was piloted by Williams and Wilmore on its first crewed mission. At first, the astronauts were supposed to stay at the orbiting lab for roughly a week.

Following Starliner's arrival at the space station, NASA and Boeing spent weeks trying to comprehend the issues that beset the test's first leg, such as helium leaks and propulsion problems.

NASA ultimately decided it was too risky to return Starliner with crew.

NASA announced last August that it was asking SpaceX to bring Williams and Wilmore home aboard the SpaceX Crew-9 capsule. That vehicle is currently docked with the space station, where Williams and Wilmore have become official members of the ISS staff as they await their return home. NASA previously said that the Crew-9 capsule would return home as soon as February.

However, the agency updated that timeline in December, saying that SpaceX needed more time to complete the capsule it would use for the Crew-10 mission, which, following NASA's precedence, would need to launch before Crew-9 leaves the ISS.

Since mission teams began the long process of evaluating the Starliner spacecraft's issues, officials at both NASA and Boeing have insisted that the astronauts were never stranded.

FAQs

Are the astronauts actually stranded on the ISS?
No, NASA had planned to return on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission, but safety concerns slowed the process.

Why isn't the Boeing Starliner bringing them back?
NASA deemed the Starliner's propulsion and helium leak issues too risky, so they chose SpaceX's safer Crew Dragon capsule.