On Thursday NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are scheduled to don spacesuits to exit the International Space Station. However, despite a plea from President Trump to bring them home as soon as possible, the pair won’t be coming home just yet. This will be a routine spacewalk outside the space station.
In the meantime, NASA is struggling to contain the fallout from what appears to be a disingenuous political effort by Trump to shame the space agency and Biden administration for the fact that Williams and Wilmore, nearly eight months after they launched into orbit on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, are still there.
The brouhaha began on Tuesday evening when SpaceX founder and Trump confidant Elon Musk posted on X that the president had asked SpaceX to bring the two “stranded” astronauts back to Earth. Musk added that SpaceX would do so, and, “Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.”
A few hours later, Trump himself weighed in, saying, “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.”
This is off-nominal
Now this is all pretty bonkers for a lot of reasons, but here are two of the biggest ones. First, Williams and Wilmore are not stranded. Their ride home, the Crew-9 Dragon spacecraft, has been docked to the station since September. They can come home at any time. In that sense, SpaceX has already “rescued” the two former Starliner astronauts.
Second, the pair was due to come back in late February—mere weeks from now—before an issue with a Crew Dragon spacecraft delayed the launch of the Crew-10 mission. This pushed the Crew-10 launch until late March, and because NASA wants a few days for a handover in orbit, this moved the return of Crew 9—with Williams and Wilmore on board—to early April.
So, to summarize, any talk about needing to “go and get” Williams and Wilmore in space is folderol. NASA had been planning, literally for months, to bring the crew home in February. Then a problem with a SpaceX vehicle delayed that return until April.
NASA, which is part of the executive branch of the government, has been doing its best to hew to the requirements of the new Trump administration. However, in a statement released Wednesday, it seems clear the agency does not want to touch this issue with a 10-foot robotic arm.
“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,” spokesperson Cheryl Warner said.
Screaming in space
It’s unclear precisely what prompted Trump and Musk to bring this issue up, but it is possible the new administration wanted a near-term “win” in space. Since SpaceX was already slated to bring the crew back in April, someone must have decided it was clever to blame the Biden administration for the Starliner predicament, frame the astronauts as “stranded,” and make Trump and Musk look like their saviors.
Let’s be clear: SpaceX and Crew Dragon currently offer NASA’s only means of getting astronauts reliably to and from the International Space Station. This is, massively, to their credit. But for all of the bravado from Musk and Trump on this issue, the most likely outcome is that they’re just going to follow the plans NASA has had in place for months.
This plan, by the way, was never political. Last summer, as NASA debated internally about whether to fly Williams and Wilmore home on Starliner—which experienced some propulsion issues en route to the space station in June 2024—I plumbed a lot of sources to determine whether the White House had intervened in the decision. After all, Vice President Kamala Harris led the National Space Council, and it would not look good to lose a crew with the impending election. During the course of that reporting I never found any evidence that the decision went above the head of NASA chief Bill Nelson.
So the return of Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore has never been a political story—until this week. And it’s a good thing that the two will be in space tomorrow because, as attested to in the tagline for the movie Alien, in space, no one can hear you scream.