For reasons that Was not immediately clear, SpaceX founder Elon Musk took Tuesday night to his social media website X to make a confusing space-based statement.
“The @potus asked @spacex to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded on the @space_station as soon as possible. We will do that, ”Musk wrote. “Terrible that the Biden Administration has left them there for so long.”
In general, at Ars Technica, it is not our policy to write stories strictly based on things Elon Musk says on X. However, this statement was so explanatory and such a consternation inducing for NASA, it carries a little outline.
In the first place, the most plausible explanation for this is that Elon is Elon. “He trolls,” said one of my best space policy sources shortly after Musk’s tweet. After all, the tweet was sent to the central time zone at 16:20, where SpaceX now has its headquarters.
Even if it trolls, it will still cause headaches within NASA.
For the first time, Nasa tried a lot to emphasize that the two astronauts referred here – Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – were not stranded at the International Space Station. There is a debate about whether there was a period last summer when the couple, who flew to the Space Station on a Boeing Starliner vehicle in early June. The mission was cried by technical problems, including problems with Starliner’s drive system. (Finally, Starliner flew home without his crew.) Since the arrival of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission with two empty seats at the end of September, Wilmore and Williams have had a safe ride home. The dragon vehicle is currently trapped after the space station.
Then, with one of the hardest microphones in the world, Musk comes and screams that the astronauts of NASA are stranded and that President Trump wants them to be saved. It is a bomb -thing for the founder of SpaceX, who became a close adviser to Trump, to say in public.
It is also possible that Musk was not underway and that Trump asked Spacex to return Wilmore and Williams earlier for political reasons – namely to be ashamed of the Biden Administration.
Neither Nasa nor SpaceX responded to a request for comment on Tuesday night.
Can they come back?
If Trump demands that Nasa bring back the astronauts now, the Crew-9 mission could return to Earth earlier. It is currently scheduled to splash down the Pacific in early April. According to Nasa, and the astronauts themselves, Wilmore and Williams are doing well in space. They have a lot of food and clothing, and a lot of work to do. Private said sources to ARS the same. Although Wilmore and Williams initially did not expect to spend ten months in space, they take no serious risks with it. In fact, it is part of their job to tackle these kinds of contingencies.
The current return date is powered by the launch of the Crew-10 mission, also on a SpaceX vehicle. This mission flies a new Dragon spacecraft, and SpaceX has previously asked a little more time to process and prepare the spacecraft for its debut launch. It has shifted the target to fly this mission from February to 25 March. To comply with this date, sources indicated that it is possible that SpaceX may have to apply another, previously flown dragon possibly the dragon intended for use by the Axiom-4-Mission-to-full crew-10.