For reasons that Were not immediately clear, the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, went to his social media site on Tuesday evening to make a permanent declaration based on space.
“The @potus asked @spacex to bring the 2 astronauts blocked on the @Space_Station to the house as soon as possible. We will, ” Musk wrote. “Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.”
Generally, at Ars Technica, it is not our policy to write stories strictly based on things that Elon Musk says on X. However, this declaration was so declarative and if inducing dismay for NASA, it carries a Little explanation.
First of all, the most plausible explanation for this is that Elon is Elon. “He drags,” said one of my best sources of space policy shortly after the Musk tweet. After all, the tweet was sent at 4:20 p.m. in the central time zone, where SpaceX now has its head office.
Even if he is in lagging behind, he will always cause headache within NASA.
Above all, NASA has made great efforts to emphasize that the two astronauts referenced here – Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – are not blocked on the international space station. There is a debate to find out if there was a period last summer when the couple, which flew to the space station on a Boeing Starliner vehicle in early June, was briefly blocked. This mission was hampered by technical problems, including problems with Starliner’s propulsion system. (Finally, Starliner returned home without his crew.) However, since the arrival of the CREW-9 mission in SpaceX with two empty seats at the end of September, Wilmore and Williams have made a safe return home. The Dragon vehicle is currently moored at the space station.
Then comes Musk, with one of the noisiest microphones in the world, shouting that NASA astronauts are blocked and that President Trump wants them to save. This is a bomb for the founder of SpaceX, who has become an advisor close to Trump, to say it publicly.
It is also possible that Musk does not fish and that Trump asked SpaceX to return Wilmore and Williams earlier for political reasons – namely, in their opinion, ashamed of the Biden administration.
Neither NASA nor SpaceX immediately responded to a request for comments on Tuesday evening.
Could they come back?
If Trump demanded that NASA brings astronauts now, the mission of the crew-9 could return to earth earlier. He is expected to splash in the Pacific Ocean 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 clothes, and a lot of work to do. In private, sources said Ars the same. Although Wilmore and Williams did not expect to spend 10 months in space, they have no serious risk to do so. In fact, this is part of their work to fight against these types of contingencies.
The current return date is driven by the launch of the CREW-10 mission, also on a SpaceX vehicle. This mission pilots a new dragon spacecraft, and SpaceX previously requested a little more time to treat and prepare the spacecraft for its first launch. This moved the target to pilot this mission from February to March 25. To reach this date, sources have indicated that it is possible that SpaceX is necessary to appropriate a different and previously piloted dragon – the dragon intended to be used by the Axiom -4 mission – for Comlet -10 crew.
