"Abandoned by Biden": Trump turns Starliner astronauts into a political issue
The Starliner crew is still on the ISS, but their spaceship has left. They are not stranded, their return is imminent. The US President doesn't think so.
Suni Williams (left) and Butch Wilmore (center) with Nick Hague on the ISS
(Image: NASA)
The return of NASA astronaut Suni Williams and her colleague Barry Wilmore, who were temporarily stranded on the ISS, is becoming a political issue just a few weeks before their departure from the International Space Station. US President Donald Trump and his close advisor, US billionaire Elon Musk, have now made sure of that. First, the SpaceX boss explained on his short message service X that he had been asked by Trump to bring the two back “as quickly as possible” and added that it was “terrible” that they had been left there for so long by Trump's predecessor in office. Trump later confirmed the request and claimed that the two had been “practically abandoned” by the Biden administration.
Return flight planned for a long time
Williams and Wilmore were the first people to fly to the ISS in the Boeing Starliner spacecraft at the beginning of June. However, due to technical problems with the spacecraft, they were unable to fly back. Instead, the Starliner flew back empty and NASA sent only two space travelers with a Crew Dragon to the ISS at the end of September. Two seats on board remained free for Williams and Wilmore. So the two of them are not stranded at all, instead they are working on the ISS and waiting for the scheduled return flight of their space capsule – which comes from Elon Musk's SpaceX. Only because the launch of the next SpaceX space capsule has now been delayed, the departure was recently postponed by a few weeks.
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SpaceX has therefore long been responsible for the return of the astronauts. As the usually well-informed journalist Eric Berger from Ars Technica now writes, there is not the slightest indication that the previous US administration had any influence on the plans to bring the two back home – even though there may have been reasons for this during the election campaign. The most likely scenario now is that Williams and Wilmore's flight home will go ahead as it has long been planned, while Trump and Musk continue to discuss a rescue and criticize the replaced US government.
(mho)
