President Trump blamed the Biden administration on Tuesday for “leaving” two astronauts that have been stuck on board The International Space Station following the problems last summer With its Boeing Starliner capsule.
In a publication to his true social platform, the president saying He has asked the founder of Spacex Elon Musk to “go to” the two “brave astronauts who have been practically abandoned in space by the Biden administration. They have been waiting for many months at the @space station. Elon will soon be on the way Lucky, hopefully, everything will be safe.
For his part, Musk had written in a Previous publication In his own social media platform X, that Trump had asked Spacex to take Starliner astronauts home as soon as possible, and added that “we will do it. Terrible that the administration drives would leave them there so long.”
Mr. Trump’s publication made Musk himself go to space, which increases the generalized confusion about what was being planned, partly because astronauts in question, Starliner commander, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and the copilot From Sunita Williams, they are not “state” in any conventional sense, and has not been “abandoned” in space.
They could return to Earth every time NASA decides, riding in a drafulation dragon capsule that He brought two members of the station crew orbit last September with two empty seats specifically for Wilmore and Williams.
They expelled on board the Starliner capsule last June 5 for an alleged mission of eight to 10 days. It was the first flight piloting of a Starliner, a key step to start the service as an operational alternative to the Dragon of the Spacex crew.
But the flight I was mistreated for leverages of propellants and pressurization problems with the Starliner propulsion system.
After multiple extensions to perform tests and analysis, NASA’s managers decided on August 24 To leave Wilmore and Williams aboard the station for a prolonged stay, Drolling the Starliner Under the remote control, without its crew, on September 7. There were no important problems.
The decision to keep Wilmore and Williams high at the station was taken by NASA’s management based on a risk assessment and a desire to minimize long -range interruption to the carefully choreographed schedule of rotation and delivery of loading missions of the crew.
In any case, following NASA’s decision, Spacex launched a four -seat crew dragon save on the space station on September 28 with only two members of the crew on board, Nick Hague and NASA cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, leaving two seats available for Wilmore and Williams.
NASA chose to carry out a normal long -term stay of Hague and Gorbunov, who launched themselves with the expectation of returning to Earth at the end of February with Wilmore and Williams. All that was known last September.
The return flight was later delayed an additional month or so to give Spacex more time to prepare a new crew dragon capsule for the inaugural flight to transport a replacement crew, crew 10, to the season.
As is now, the crew commander 9 Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams hope to return to Earth at the end of March. At that time, the two Starliner astronauts will have registered about 300 days in space. Both astronauts have said they understood NASA’s decision to extend their mission.
As founder of Spacex, Musk was undoubtedly aware of those decisions when they were made and the logic behind them. There have been no reports of any direct participation of the Biden Administration in the decisions to extend the stay of the Starliner team in space, and Musk did not offer criticism of NASA’s decision at that time.
As for what to return the Starliner team to the Earth “as soon as possible” it could mean, the only obvious response would be to bring the Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams earlier than expected. They would not need anyone to come to look for them.
But an early game would leave behind an American astronaut at the space station: Don Pettit, who launched the laboratory last year aboard a Russian soy spacecraft along with two Russian crew companions.
NASA would only have an astronaut aboard the station to operate the multiple module laboratory segment, probably stopping the research on its tracks until crew 10 could arrive on board the next dragon of the crew.
Rumors indicate that crew 10 Dragon could face additional delays. NASA could choose to move to the station’s next crew to a crew dragon for a commercial trip to the station that carries a crew sponsored by Axiom Space, based in Houston. That could move the crew 9 returns a few days, but not for a significant amount.
It is not believed that a crew dragon that will be used for a commercial space tourism flight around the land posts This spring is an option because it is not equipped with a space station coupling mechanism.
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