SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft is ready for launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Credit: SpaceX
For reasons that were not immediately clear, SpaceX founder Elon Musk took to his social media site X on Tuesday evening to make a perplexing space-based pronouncement.
“The @POTUS has asked @SpaceX to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded on the @Space_Station as soon as possible. We will do so,” Musk wrote. “Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.”
Now generally, 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 declarative, and so consternation-inducing for NASA, it bears a bit of explication.
First of all, the most plausible explanation for this is that Elon is being Elon. “He’s trolling,” said one of my best space policy sources shortly after Musk’s tweet. After all, the tweet was sent at 4:20 pm in the central time zone, where SpaceX now has its headquarters.
Even if it is trolling, it will still cause headaches within NASA.
Foremost, NASA has gone to great lengths to stress that the two astronauts referenced here—Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams—are not stranded on the International Space Station. There is some debate about whether there was a period last summer when the pair, who flew to the space station on a Boeing Starliner vehicle in early June, were briefly stranded. That mission was hobbled by technical issues, including problems with Starliner’s propulsion system. (Ultimately, Starliner flew home without its crew.) However, since the arrival of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission with two empty seats in late September, Wilmore and Williams have had a safe ride home. The Dragon vehicle is presently docked to the space station.
Then along comes Musk, with one of the world’s loudest microphones, shouting that NASA’s astronauts are stranded and that President Trump wants them saved. It’s a bombshell thing for the founder of SpaceX, who has become a close advisor to Trump, to say publicly.
It is also possible that Musk was not trolling and that Trump asked SpaceX to return Wilmore and Williams earlier for political reasons—namely to, in their view, shame the Biden administration.
Neither NASA nor SpaceX responded immediately to a request for comment on Tuesday evening.
Could they come back?
If Trump demanded that NASA bring the astronauts back now, the Crew-9 mission could return to Earth earlier. It is presently scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean in early April. According to NASA, and the astronauts themselves, Wilmore and Williams are doing fine in space. They have plenty of food, clothes, and work to do. Privately, sources have told Ars the same. Although Wilmore and Williams were not initially expecting to spend 10 months in space, they’re taking no serious risks in doing so. In fact, it’s part of their jobs to tackle these kinds of contingencies.
The current return date is being driven by the launch of the Crew-10 mission, also on a SpaceX vehicle. This mission is flying a new Dragon spacecraft, and SpaceX previously asked for a little more time to process and prepare the spacecraft for its debut launch. This moved the target for flying this mission from February to March 25. To meet this date, sources indicated that it’s possible SpaceX may need to appropriate a different, previously flown Dragon—possibly the Dragon intended for use by the Axiom-4 mission—to complete Crew-10.
NASA would very much prefer the four astronauts on Crew-10 arrive before Crew-9 departs. Why? Because if Crew-9 were to depart sooner, it would leave just a single astronaut, Don Pettit, on board the station. Now, Pettit is a very experienced and capable astronaut, but having just a single NASA astronaut on board to operate the US segment of the station is far from optimal. In addition to leaving Pettit in a difficult position, it would cancel a planned spacewalk in March and leave just a single person to prepare a Northrop Grumman cargo spacecraft for departure. This is apparently a big deal.
“It takes time to load trash; everything has to be packed in certain bags in certain locations for various reasons,” a NASA source told Ars. “For example, any batteries that are being trashed have to be in a fireproof container. Bags have to be loaded in certain locations to maintain the proper center of gravity. And you’ve got seven crew members worth of trash that have already been waiting since the last disposal flight.”
Another consideration is if Crew-10 were to slip further from its late March launch date. Pettit flew to the space station on a Russian Soyuz vehicle, and it is due to return on April 20. The Soyuz spacecraft is certified to remain in orbit for 210 days, and April 20 is already 221 days after their launch. April 20 is probably a hard end date for that mission.
So technically, yes, the “stranded” astronauts on the space station probably could come home as early as next week. But if they were to do so, it would create a lot of headaches for NASA, its international partners, and probably even for Musk’s human spaceflight team at SpaceX.
Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.
