Elon Musk has said that President Trump has requested that SpaceX bring the 2 astronauts that are currently stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) back home "as soon as possible".
In a post on X, the SpaceX and Tesla boss said "The POTUS has asked SpaceX to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded on the Space Station as soon as possible. We will do so", while adding "terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long".
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stuck on the ISS since June 2024 after arriving on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft as part of the Crew Flight Test mission. NASA decided that they would come home on Dragon after "uncertainties" surrounding Starliner.
The US space agency has repeatedly said that the NASA astronauts are not "stranded" but rather that Starliner doesn't have enough assurances around it to support a crewed trip back to Earth.
In a reporter roundtable in December 2024, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said: "That was a unanimous decision not to return them on the Starliner. We finally knew with all that extra testing that they had done at White Sands, we knew what the cause was of why that valve was not performing, but we did not know why and that was just not worth taking the risk".
Elon Musk, President Trump, and SpaceX are doing what NASA can't... and bringing the astronauts back onto home soil. Insane, considering the trillions of dollars of funding that NASA has received over the decades from the US government.
