By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump said Tuesday night he had asked Elon Musk’s SpaceX to return two NASA astronauts from the International Space Station, who were already scheduled to fly back on a SpaceX capsule in March.
Musk earlier on Tuesday said Trump had asked him to return the two astronauts “as soon as possible,” suggesting a change to NASA’s current plan for a late March return. “We will do so,” Musk said.
“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 wrote on Truth Social. “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!!!”
His demand that SpaceX retrieve veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been assigned a SpaceX ride home since August, was an unusual intervention by a U.S. president into NASA’s operations that caught many agency officials by surprise, two officials said.
A NASA spokesman did not immediately return requests for comment.
Wilmore and Williams flew Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft to the ISS last summer for an eight-day test mission that instead has lasted nearly a year because of problems with the craft’s propulsion system.
NASA in August, during President Joe Biden’s administration, deemed Starliner too risky to bring them back to Earth and tapped SpaceX to return them on a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
That craft is already docked with the space station, having flown there for NASA’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission in September with empty seats for Wilmore and Williams.
The astronauts’ original February departure date on Crew-9 was delayed to late March because SpaceX needed more time “to complete processing” of a new Crew Dragon capsule that will replace theirs for the Crew-10 mission, NASA said in December.
The agency has a delicately coordinated ISS schedule, and an early return might leave the station’s U.S. contingent understaffed.
It was unclear whether Trump’s demand would mean NASA bringing Crew-9 back to Earth before the Crew-10 capsule arrives, or SpaceX launching Crew-10 earlier than planned.
Returning Crew-9 to Earth before Crew-10’s arrival would mean NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who flew to the ISS with a Russian crew in September, would be the only American aboard the station, a rare staffing imbalance that NASA has said complicates maintenance of the station’s U.S. components.
Wilmore and Williams are among seven astronauts on the ISS, and they remain healthy and busy with routine scientific research aboard the station, NASA has said.
Though Starliner’s development since 2019 has been a persistent challenge for Boeing, rife with engineering troubles and cost overruns, some Trump advisers in recent months have sought to blame Biden, although the former president had no involvement in Starliner’s development.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette. Editing by Gerry Doyle)
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