https://www.iflscience.com/nasa-astronauts-stuck-on-iss-respond-to-musks-claim-he-offered-to-get-them-home-early-78310
NASA Astronauts Stuck On ISS Respond To Musk's Claim He Offered To Get Them Home Early
March 5, 2025
NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore have said they were unaware of any offer by Elon Musk to bring them back to Earth early, in a press conference from the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday.
Last year, on June 5, Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore departed for the ISS on board Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.
The trip was only supposed to last eight days, but due to problems with the Starliner ship, the astronauts were unable to return on their departure date, and the spacecraft returned uncrewed.
Though not ideal, the situation was not without precedent. Astronauts and cosmonauts have had to stay longer on various space stations after similar problems.
In September 2023, astronaut Frank Rubio became the first NASA astronaut to stay in space for over a year.
In 2022, Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin became stuck on the ISS when the cosmonauts' ship became damaged by a meteoroid, resulting in a coolant leak.
A second Soyuz spacecraft was sent to return the three to Earth safely. However, the crew could not simply leave the ISS, and remained to conduct the work which would have been carried out by a fresh crew delivery in the now-empty Soyuz craft.
Others have been stranded in space following the failures of shuttles.
For instance, following the Columbia disaster in 2003, when the Columbia shuttle disintegrated during re-entry with seven astronauts on board, NASA suspended flights for two years while it investigated the failure.
Astronauts then had to rely on the Soyuz spacecraft, and those still in space had to stay there for a few extra months.
Unfortunately, delays like this are part and parcel of human spaceflight, and operating a space station orbiting around the Earth.
In order to run the space station properly and keep a human presence in space – and conduct all the research taking place on it – you need an adequate crew.
Knowing this, Williams and Wilmore agreed to stay on board while NASA collaborated with Musk's SpaceX on a return mission, to take place in March.
For their part, the astronauts do not seem too unhappy with the situation, and have even participated in a spacewalk during normal ISS operations.
“We're doing pretty darn good, actually. You know, we've got food, we've got clothes. We have great crew members up here,” Willams told CNN in an interview that aired on Friday, February 13, 2025.
"We don't feel abandoned. We don't feel stuck. We don't feel stranded," Wilmore added. "I understand why others may think that. We come prepared. We come committed.
That is what your human spaceflight program is: It prepares for any and all contingencies that we can conceive of, and we prepare for those."
While the astronauts do not feel stranded or abandoned, US President Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Musk have made claims that the two are "stranded" in space, and were left up there for politcal reasons by the Biden administration.
In a heated exchange with several astronauts, Musk even called European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut and former ISS commander Andreas Mogensen a slur.
During this exchange, Musk claimed that he had made an offer to bring the astronauts home early, but that it was rejected for political reasons.
"Price was never even discussed! They flatly refused. We would have made it work within the annual budget," the head of DOGE wrote on X. "The real issue is that they did not want positive press for someone who supported Trump. That’s it. End of story."
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