SpaceX CEO Elon Musk chided the Biden administration for leaving two astronauts "stranded" on the International Space Station in a Tuesday X post—and said President Trump had requested that SpaceX bring Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore home as soon as possible. "We will do so," Musk wrote. CNN reports NASA had asked SpaceX to do that very thing in August using its Crew-9 capsule, which is currently docked at the ISS. The decision came as a blow to Boeing, which hoped its Starliner would be used. Williams and Wilmore arrived at the ISS in June via the Starliner spacecraft, which suffered propulsion system issues, in what was supposed to be an 8-day visit.
NASA originally expected the Crew-9 capsule would return to Earth in February. But in December it announced that timeline needed to be pushed to at least late March as SpaceX needed more time to finish its Crew-10 capsule, which would need to launch before Crew-9 departs the ISS. Ars Technica characterizes the X post as a "perplexing space-based pronouncement," noting "NASA has gone to great lengths to stress that the two astronauts ... are not stranded" and have had a "safe ride home" since SpaceX's Crew-9 mission arrived with two empty seats in late September.
Ars explains that if Trump is pushing Musk to get them back more quickly, the Crew-9 mission could head back to Earth earlier. The issue is that SpaceX would either need to use a previously flown Dragon for the Crew-10 mission or NASA would need to be OK with Crew-9 leaving before Crew-10 shows up. That would leave just one US astronaut, Don Pettit, on board the ISS, which is "far from optimal." One of the biggest issues is he would have to prep a Northrop Grumman cargo spacecraft for departure solo, and a source tells Ars that's no easy task. "It takes time to load trash; everything has to be packed in certain bags in certain locations for various reasons." (More Elon Musk stories.)
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