For reasons that were not clear immediately, the founder of Spacex, Elon Musk, went 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 do it.” 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.