A incendiary message. “The president of the United States has asked Spacex to bring the two astronauts stranded at the International Space Station as soon as possible,” Elon Musk wrote In his profile of X. “It is terrible that the Biden administration has left them there for so long.”
After 20 minutes, more than one million people have seen the message, which Musk apostilled answering “true” to the following answer: “The hatred they had was greater than their desire to rescue those astronauts.”
A little context. In June 2024, two astronauts arrived at the International Space Station aboard the Starliner spacecraft, Boeing’s alternative to the Crew Dragon of Spacex.
The ship had to spend a week in orbit before returning to Earth, but A failure in the propulsion system During the first leg he made three months undergoing And finally I would go empty.
Elon Musk’s X messages about astronauts
Elon Musk lies. No one will be surprised at this point that Musk publishes propaganda in his X profile, but the message misrepresent the reality in a particularly fantasy way.
While it is true that astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are still in space since June, they are not stranded. SPACEX CREW-9 MISSION took off in September 2024long before Trump assumed the presidency, with two empty seats to bring them back.
So why do they continue in the ISS? It was the plan provided by NASA. Wilmore and Williams were reallocated to the CREW-9 mission and became part of the permanent crew of the International Space Station. Williams is, in fact, the commander of expedition 72, and He has just taken a space walk As part of your tasks.
That NASA did not ask Spacex to look for them immediately has nothing to do with the hatred of Musk, but that there was no crew dragon to immediately available. The most logical solution was to get two astronauts out of the next round trip (the CREW-9 mission) to leave two free seats.
And now what? The return of the CREW-9 mission is scheduled for the end of March 2025. So far, the expected thing was that Wilmore and Williams return along with their mission partners, the American Nick Hague and the Russian Aleksandr Gorbunov, in March or maybe in April. But Musk’s message suggests that perhaps his return goes ahead.
As for the Starliner, NASA canceled the flight that had hired Boeing By 2025. The two astronaut rotations of this year will be in charge of Spacex while Boeing continues to analyze what could fail in its first manned flight and how it plans to solve it.
Images | Steve Jurvetson (CC By 2.0), NASA
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