For reasons that They were not clear immediately, the founder of Spacex, Elon Musk, led to his social media site X on Tuesday night to make a disconcerting pronouncement based on space.
“The @potus has asked @spacex to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded in the @space_station as soon as possible. We will ” The musk wrote. “Terrible that the Administration Biden would leave them there for so long.”
Now, in general, in Ars Technica, it is not our policy to write stories strictly based on things that Elon Musk says in X. However, this statement was so declarative and inductor of dismay for NASA, it has a little explanation.
First, the most plausible explanation for this is that Elon is being Elon. “He is 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 inside NASA.
It is no more important, NASA has done everything possible to emphasize that the two astronauts referred to here, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, are not stranded in the International Space Station. There is some debate about whether there was a period last summer when the couple, which flew to the space station in a Boeing Starliner vehicle in early June, were briefly stranded. That mission was consistent with technical problems, including problems with the Starliner propulsion system. (Ultimately, Starliner flew home without its crew.) However, since the arrival of the CREW-9 mission of Spacex with two empty seats at the end of September, Wilmore and Williams have had a safe trip home. The dragon vehicle is currently docked to the space station.
Then comes the musk, with one of the most noisy microphones in the world, shouting that NASA astronauts are stranded and that President Trump wants them to save them. It is a bomb for the founder of Spacex, which has become a nearby 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 before for political reasons, that is, in his opinion, embarrass the Biden administration.
Neither NASA nor Spacex immediately responded to a request for comments on Tuesday night.
Could they come back?
If Trump demands that NASA bring astronauts back now, the crew mission could return to Earth before. It is currently scheduled to splash in the Pacific Ocean in early April. According to NASA, and astronauts themselves, Wilmore and Williams are fine in space. They have a lot of food and clothes, and a lot of work to do. In private, the sources have told Ars the same. Although Wilmore and Williams initially did not expect to spend 10 months in space, they are not taking serious risks in doing so. In fact, it is part of your work to address this type of contingencies.
The current return date is being conducted by the launch of the CREW-10 mission, also in a Spacex vehicle. This mission is flying a new Dragon spacecraft, and Spacex previously requested a little more time to process and prepare the spacecraft for its debut launch. This moved the goal to fly this mission from February to March 25. To comply with this date, the sources indicated that it is possible that Spacex may need to appropriate a different dragon, previously flew, possibly the dragon destined to use by the mission of the Axiom-4, to CREW-10 complete.
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