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The return of astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore after an extended stay on the International Space Station has been the subject of competing claims about the actions of the Trump and Biden administrations in bringing them home.
White House adviser Elon Musk, whose SpaceX company aided the astronauts’ return, said he had offered last year to bring the two astronauts home much sooner but the Biden administration declined for “political reasons.” NASA and space experts, including the two astronauts themselves, dispute that the decision was based on politics.
In a press conference on March 4, NASA officials said safety, budget concerns about a separate mission to retrieve the astronauts and a desire to keep a crew on the space station were the reasons driving the decision to have Williams and Wilmore return with a SpaceX crew, which is expected to land on Earth today.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly claimed that he expedited the return of the astronauts after making a personal appeal to Musk. The mission to return the two astronauts has been in the works since late last summer, and the timeline for their return is roughly in line with that plan.
We’ll lay out what we know about the mission and the role the Biden administration, Musk and Trump may have played in it.
A Delayed Return
Williams and Wilmore left Earth on June 5, 2024, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on a mission that was supposed to last eight days. The purpose of the mission was to evaluate if the spacecraft could be used for regular astronaut rotation missions. However, shortly after liftoff, the Starliner experienced multiple helium leaks, which caused the return mission to be halted until further testing could be conducted.
Although the helium leaks stabilized after arrival, problems with the thrusters convinced NASA to send the Starliner aircraft back to Earth empty. That’s when Musk came into the picture, as NASA and SpaceX officials huddled last summer to determine a plan to return the astronauts.
In August 2024, NASA announced that it would be using SpaceX’s Dragon capsule to bring back the astronauts in February 2025. In September, the mission launched Crew-9 with NASA’s Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who successfully reached the International Space Station on Sept. 29. The capsule was launched with two empty seats for the crew, including Williams and Wilmore, to return in February, after being replaced on the space station by astronauts from Crew-10. NASA officials said late February was the earliest the crew could return on SpaceX without interrupting other scheduled missions.
In recent months, Musk and Trump have claimed the Biden administration decided to leave the astronauts on the space station until after the November election to avoid bad publicity.
Trump and Musk Comments
During a Fox News interview with host Sean Hannity on Feb. 18, Trump said he gave Musk the “go-ahead” to accelerate a mission to retrieve the astronauts, claiming that they had been abandoned on purpose by former President Joe Biden to avoid political backlash. Trump said, “They didn’t have the go-ahead with Biden. He was going to leave them in space. I think he was going to leave them in space. … He didn’t want the publicity. Can you believe it?”
It was not the first time Trump had made such an accusation. On Jan. 28, Trump took to Truth Social to post, “I have just asked Elon Musk and @SpaceX to ‘go get’ the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration.”
During the Hannity interview, Musk claimed that at Trump’s request “we are accelerating the return of the astronauts, which was postponed, kind of, to a ridiculous degree,” saying that “they were left up there for political reasons, which is not good.”
In response to Musk’s claims, several astronauts took to X to refute the idea that the astronauts were purposefully abandoned. Andreas Mogensen, a former SpaceX astronaut from Denmark, posted: “What a lie. And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.” In response to Mogensen, Elon replied: “You are fully retarded. SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused. Return WAS pushed back for political reasons. Idiot.”
Mogensen responded by stating, “Elon, I have long admired you and what you have accomplished, especially at SpaceX and Tesla. You know as well as I do, that Butch and Suni are returning with Crew-9, as has been the plan since last September. Even now, you are not sending up a rescue ship to bring them home. They are returning on the Dragon capsule that has been on ISS since last September.”
The White House has not responded to our inquiry about Trump’s and Musk’s claims.
Williams and Wilmore Weigh In
In an interview on CNN with Williams and Wilmore on Feb. 13, host Anderson Cooper asked if they felt abandoned by the Biden administration.
“We don’t feel abandoned. We don’t feel stuck. We don’t feel stranded,” Wilmore said from the space station, which orbits the Earth and acts as a science laboratory. “I understand why others may think that. We come prepared. We come committed. That is what your human space flight program is. It prepares for any and all contingencies that we can conceive of, and we prepare for those. So if you’ll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative, let’s change it to prepared and committed like what you’ve been hearing. That’s what we prefer.”
Williams reiterated that “Butch and I knew this was a test flight” and “that we would probably find some things [wrong with Starliner] and we found some stuff, and so that was not a surprise.”
As for the prospect of sending up a SpaceX flight just to bring them back earlier, Wilmore said, “We would never expect to come back just special for us, or anyone, unless it was a medical issue or something really out of the circumstances along those lines.”
In a news conference from the space station on March 4 with Williams, Wilmore and NASA’s Nick Hague — one of the two astronauts who arrived via a SpaceX capsule in September — Wilmore said he had no reason to doubt Musk’s claims about an offer to bring them home earlier, though Wilmore said he was not privy to such an offer.
“We have no information on that though, whatsoever,” Wilmore said. “That’s information that we simply don’t have. So I believe him, I don’t know all those details, and I don’t think any of us really can give you the answer that maybe that you would be hoping for.”
Asked about the claims of political motivations for their extended stay, Wilmore said that Musk and Trump may have information “that we are not privy to.”
But, he said, “from my standpoint, politics is not playing into this at all. From our standpoint, I think that they would agree, we came up prepared to stay long, even though we plan to stay short.”
Hague added that “when I launched in in late September, our planned return date was the end of February, and given the amount of training that’s required to get a crew ready and the complexities associated with getting a spacecraft ready to launch and operate in space, targeting a March return is pretty much on target.”
NASA’s Explanation
Several leaders at NASA said they were unaware of Musk’s offer to bring the astronauts home sooner.
Bill Nelson, who served as NASA administrator last summer when the decisions about what to do about Williams and Wilmore were being made, told the Washington Post that the option of an earlier return “certainly did not come to my attention.” Nelson said, “There was no discussion of that whatsoever. Maybe he [Musk] sent a message to some lower-level person.”
In the March 4 NASA news conference, NASA officials were asked repeatedly about Musk’s claim that he offered to bring Williams and Wilmore home earlier, and what went into the decision officials ultimately made.
Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said, “I think there may have been some conversations that I wasn’t part of.” But he said the option to fly a separate mission to the space station to retrieve the astronauts was “ruled out pretty quickly.”
“When it comes to adding on missions or bringing a capsule home early, those were always options, but we ruled them out pretty quickly, just based on how much money we’ve got in our budget and the importance of keeping crews on the International Space Station,” Bowersox said. “They’re an important part of maintaining the station, so we like to keep our crews up there.”
Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said after the determination was made that Williams and Wilmore should not return on the Boeing Starliner, NASA officials met with SpaceX officials and considered “a wide range of options” and ultimately decided to attach the astronauts to the previously scheduled Crew-9 mission.
“When we looked at the situation at the time, we had a Crew-9 launch in front of us, it made sense to take the opportunity to bring Crew-9 up with just two seats and have Butch and Suni fill in and do the rest of the long duration mission,” said Dana Weigel, manager of NASA’s International Space Station Program.
“We thought the plan that we came up with made a lot of sense, and that, especially for Butch and Suni we know they’re experienced astronauts, they’re great in space,” Bowersox said. “We knew they’d be great additions to the crew and we knew that for most astronauts, spending extra time on orbit’s really a gift. And we thought they’d probably enjoy their time there. So we thought it was a good way to go … for a lot of reasons.”
Also at the NASA press conference was Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of building flight reliability at SpaceX, but he declined to provide specifics about Musk’s offer to bring the astronauts home earlier.
Gerstenmaier said SpaceX was “always ready to support NASA in any way we can.” He said NASA and SpaceX “collectively” came up with “the idea of just flying two crew up on Crew-9, having the seats available for Suni and Butch to come home, and that’s what NASA wanted, and that fit their plans. That allowed them to use Suni and Butch in a very productive manner, make them part of the crew on board station and make really a seamless integration and keep the science going on station and keep pushing research.”
Trump’s Role in the Mission
NASA officials said Trump’s involvement did not expedite the mission that would bring the astronauts home.
Again, Williams and Wilmore, along with members of Crew-9, were waiting to hand off to Crew-10 before leaving the space station for home. But Crew-10’s mission was originally delayed in December 2024 to “give the teams time to complete processing on a new Dragon spacecraft for the mission,” according to Reuters. In a statement released in December, NASA wrote, “NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 now is targeting no earlier than late March 2025 to launch four crew members to the International Space Station.” (Originally, Crew-10 was supposed to launch in late February.)
But in February the agency announced that “NASA and SpaceX are accelerating the target launch and return dates for the upcoming crew rotation missions to and from the International Space Station.”
The agency, in collaboration with SpaceX, was able to move up the launch by adjusting the original plan to fly a new Dragon spacecraft and instead fly a previously tested Dragon spacecraft called Endurance. Endurance has flown four missions to the station, including the Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 flights. NASA stated the decision was made by “mission management” and joint teams were working to complete assessments on the previously flown craft to ensure it “meets the agency’s Commercial Crew Program safety and certification requirements.”
NASA said the change also “will allow SpaceX, which owns and operates the Dragon fleet, to complete the new spacecraft’s interior build and perform final integration activities, while simultaneously launching Crew-10 and returning Crew-9 sooner.”
Asked if Trump’s call on Musk to expedite the mission played a factor, Stich, the program manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said that when the schedule for upcoming space missions was laid out, based on when a capsule was ready and a launch pad freed up, “we ended up with March the 12th. And so it really was driven by a lot of other factors. And we were looking at this before some of those statements were made by the president and Mr. Musk.”
Bowersox said Trump’s comments “added energy to the conversation” but didn’t affect the decisions NASA made.
“I can verify that Steve had been talking about how we might need to juggle the flights and switch capsules a good month before there was any discussion outside of NASA,” Bowersox said. “But the president’s interest sure added energy to the conversation, and it’s great to have a president who’s interested in what we’re doing.”
Crew-10 reached the space station on March 16, and Williams and Wilmore — along with Hague and Gorbunov — have since left the space station aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule. They are expected to land off the coast of Florida on March 18.
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